A Change of Villains
by Harmonious Cannons
Summary: Voldemort...was just the beginning. A terror far worse than he could ever hope to be was awoken during his defeat. NON-CANON for HP. Has obvious MCU deviations. M because the Capsicle scolded me for "Language!" and probable violence.
1. A Change of Villains

**A Change of Villains**

A wand flew through the air, back to its true owner. It was a moment in time, as it hurtled through space, this changer of reality, towards its companion who had wielded a stone with the power to communicate with souls, and the wand had no idea about the power it wielded, for it had no mind. It was in a truly singular position.

And then, it made contact with its new owner's hand, releasing a pulse, so small that it wasn't detected by those around in the battle where one Harry Potter had just defeated the flimsy, murderous soul-shredding idiot called Voldemort. With the magnitudes of magical power being released, it wasn't even sensed, let alone registered, by anyone.

And yet, magic is a curious thing, for like most pulsating energies, it has both magnitude and frequencies. Perfectly equal in-phase heart-rate level frequencies could kill with the same but negative magnitude. High multiples of a synapse's minimum firing rate could trigger intense pain. Varying frequencies with phase shifts of the same firing range could be used to manipulate minds.

The pulse that the wand released contained a frequency that was recorded across the universe. It was of a very short duration, but of such a high frequency that it only registered on the most sophisticated equipment in the most sophisticated labs on earth, where the scientists tried to figure out where this pulse was emitted from, and where in the universe it was aimed at.

The frequency, at a staggering 10 to the power of 40 hertz, was also, incidentally, a key. It was the key to the lock that had been put in place by many, many well-meaning people sometime before the birth of _that_ universe. Yes. The pulse was the key to the multi-verse, the key that kept several beings away from the earth, and earth away from them. It also kept the one being, the greatest villain of them all, away from unleashing the true scope of its power.

At three centres, in London, in New York and in Hong Kong, apart from the nodal origin of Kamar-Taj, a strange woman, known only as the Ancient One, woke, startled out of her contemplations, as several futures were wiped out and several more were formed in the blink of an eye.

Far away in the realms of the Gods, where preparations were in order to deal with the coming turn of events when the nine realms would once again coalesce, a shudder ran through every soul, as the Allfather stood to give his orders, orders to ensure that the work of Bor would not come undone.

In a laboratory of high secrecy in New York, affiliated to a very secret agency, another man of great intellect, love for flashy cars and women, and an even greater ego, was notified by a contact in the most secret of government organisations. The one-eyed herald had to speed up his plans, as he met the great young intellectual in person several milleniums, if not a long forever, before he would have liked to do so, who knew of the artefact obtained by accident while fishing in the Arctic Ocean for a great hero so as to ensure that a great military secret died with him, and also to give him a decent burial befitting a War hero. Their possession, which they believed to be the source of energy, was acting up intermittently, something it never had since being found.

On the planet of Morag, there was an unheard hum.

And on the throne locked away (another – rather the most important – thing that the key could be used for), it was a being that didn't wish to **_flee_** from death. It actively **_courted_** her. And that being, waiting for every instant of its existence for the unlocking that it knew would come, opened its eyes, revealing red eyes set in a solid purple face, as it looked from its throne towards the caged personification of the one he loved the most.

"You lost your most prized possession away, my love," he said in a voice that was a gentle caress, flexing his golden glove, the infamous Infinity Gauntlet, with the stone that ensnared the mind upon it, "but I shall bring it back for you; and the others too, in time. And then, my love, I shall lay it all to your feet as I restore balance to the universe."

Death looked nothing different apart from the cold indifference she already portrayed. It didn't matter.

Her stone, the stone that had been split under duress, its power given to a simple tree stick under the threat of being tied down – for she couldn't be decimated – by the users of the purple stone of Power, and forgotten as she was taken to another time, in space and into another reality by the users of the other three that were still lost – Agamotto, the creator of the Eye of Agamotto, the Asgardians and Bor, and the ones who had the power over space before the stone was taken to earth, was awake once more. It would no longer lose its powers to hide from all but her to a simple cloak.

The Soul Stone was awake.

The quest for the Infinity Stones was now afoot.

* * *

Just an attempt to write down my ideas for a future MCU/Harry Potter Crossover. The Resurrection Stone seems to be the obvious Soul Stone, no?

The Temporal Penguin


	2. The Mistake That Was and Wasn't

**The Mistake that Was and Wasn't**

A/N: Thanks to all those who have marked this story as a favourite and to those who have followed it, and of course, Traveler301, stars90 and Guest who took the time to give their feedback.

Also as the story summary says, this is **_NON-CANON_** for HP: **Harry will be a lot like himself, but one who, in the end, understands that the truth has to be protected by a bodyguard of half-truths, white lies and implications, and has also killed and is therefore far less forgiving. He will still have a Steve Rogers-esque sense of honour, if it is relevant to the situation though.** I **t is not a major deviation as far as the general plot of canon goes (Voldemort still dies by the rebounding curse), apart from some character deaths, pairings and motivations. Dumbledore has been freer with information.**

* * *

The Order was gathered again at Hogwarts, for one final time, to take stock after the defeat of the Dark Lord. They had sustained heavy losses. Dear friends were taken. Loved ones were snatched. Great people were gone, leaving behind only memories to cherish. For a while, all hope had seemed lost, when their champion had seemed lost and their enemy victorious. But he had returned from the Great Beyond and done the job.

He was not the Order's leader, but that was only a function of his age, and not his capability. In time, they knew that he would be the leader, for evil never is destroyed, just as the light never dies.

The Matriarch of the Order, Minerva McGonagall who was Founder Albus Dumbledore's second in command in the school as well as the Administrative side of the Order, sat at the Head of the Table. To her left sat Kingsley Shacklebolt, the lone Auror alive out of three that graced their ranks. He sat grim-faced, having lost both his mentor and his protégé during the past year. He was joined by Charlie Weasley, his face still pale. The man, his mother and his youngest sibling, a sister, were the only ones alive out of a family of nine. A big, happy family was reduced to cinders by the war.

He wasn't alone in his grief. Remus Lupin, bouncing his son on his knee, was still looking into the distance with his one good eye as he grieved for his Auror wife, Kingsley's protégé Nymphadora Tonks. Sirius Black, with a practically entirely prosthetic right side sat beside him. Bellatrix Lestrange had done quite the number on him two years prior. Hestia and Gwenog Jones, the sisters, rounded up the side of the older cadre. They were all that were left of them.

On the other side of the table though, sat the younger cadre. These were the people who had known a semblance of peace in their childhood and had seen war and the devastation it brought. Daphne Greengrass, a Potioneer par excellence, Anthony Goldstein the speaker, Susan Bones the investigator and interrogator, Hannah Abbott the healer, Parvati and Padma Patil the Girls Friday, Theodore Nott the tactician and blood-traitor, son of a Death Eater, Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood, the naturalists, Hermione Granger the inventor – one of a team of three, and last but not the least, Harry Potter, the victor, the fighter, the most powerful wizard of his age, the prophesised one, and the Master of Death, sat in order.

Behind Minerva were two easels with portraits. One was of Albus Dumbledore, the founder of the Order. He was beaming from the portrait. The other was of the man who walked the line between both camps successfully, though his loyalty was to the man who tried to give him freedom, and whom he ended up having to kill in the end on that very man's orders. It was Severus Snape.

"We sit here today in memory of the fallen, and to ensure the continuation of their legacy, with honour, honesty, power and justice," the people who sat intoned grimly intoned as one. They spent a minute in a silence of remembrance.

"It is my responsibility today, to announce the commencement of this meeting of the Order of the Phoenix," Minerva McGonagall declared gravely. "With us are two of our fallen, in ways that are truly magical." She then went on to explain to the people who were glaring at the portrait of Severus Snape, what exactly the man had done as their mole within the ranks. A motion was passed to approve his membership among the martyrs.

The man himself looked at Harry for a second, before nodding with an expressionless face. "So I must have succeeded."

"You did. Though in the visions I shared with the fiend, you always seemed to be trying to tell him not to use the Killing Curse on me."

"Of course I did that. Don't be a dunderhead Potter. I know these psychopaths. And idiots like that Dark Lord," he added with a sneer. "He wanted to cut you down – to take no chances. So I might have used reverse psychology. Albus was insistent that the Killing Curse was the only way."

"You...you..." Hermione began. "You knew?"

"Please don't disappoint me in death!" the man snapped. "I have – had – known for the entire time since I made the two greatest mistakes of my life that I was beyond redemption. Yet Dumbledore tried to save me. I have only ever had two friends, and both wanted to protect Potter. I had a hand in both their deaths, but I wouldn't fail them, girl!"

"And we thank you for that, sir," Harry added solemnly. "Even though Professor Dumbledore had left me memories about what should happen and why, it was difficult to accept." Everyone else had obviously thought about the time Harry had disappeared for a bit before he was seen entering the forest to be when he saw Dumbledore's memories. "It must have been doubly so, knowing that a lot would hinge on each of your actions, on every word you spoke, with those you were helping believing that you were a traitor. My only regret is that you do not live to sit among us again."

There were several murmurs of agreement. Remus and Sirius exchanged a glance, before Sirius spoke, "And we apologise to you for our conduct. We never did look beyond your status as a Death Eater."

Severus levelled another neutral look at Harry and the two living Marauders. "As do I," he replied stiltedly. "I hope, in death, all is forgiven and forgotten as it should be. As I said, I knew my mistake. Your group and I were never friends. But you really weren't my enemy either. Neither of us really learnt to draw the line, and in the end, I think we both became our own worst enemies, Black. In the end, we both fought for what was right, as Albus used to say. And that is all that should matter."

The two Marauders nodded. Severus Snape would have their eternal respect, and in the end, maybe not as grudging as they believed.

"And as for your sentiment, Potter, do not waste it on me. For close to two decades, I have been imprisoned by my choices. Now I am free. It is better than any fate I could hope to expect. I died a quick painless death, and only lived to be torn by the terrible crime of being Albus' murderer for a year, as opposed to sixteen years for Lily."

Nobody could think of anything to say to that. Harry just nodded at the man's portrait.

"I still am disappointed by your pessimism, Severus, but it did work out in the end – if with far too many losses for anyone's peace of mind," Dumbledore's portrait spoke.

"That it did," agreed Minerva solemnly. "However, we were sure we had lost..."

"When it seemed that Harry had died, yes," completed the portrait. "However, he had known all along, and I knew Harry would keep that secret, because it needed to be kept."

"You had known you would die?" asked Sirius angrily, even as Hermione gasped the same. She was flabbergasted. She had been Harry's best friend, and if not for the war... But the sight of his dead body had crushed her. To know that he had known all through the year as he had fought and killed more Death Eaters, in a decisive break from the Order's tradition, she didn't know what to think.

"Yes," responded the Master of Death. "I had known that the only way to undo all magics Voldemort cast on me was to let him complete his first-ever spell on me. Professor Dumbledore had told me the why, the how, and also that I would live. I had faith in his judgement, as he had in us all when he allowed us to build the next generation of the Order and when we decided to take the fight to them and kill the worse Death Eaters. It would have been quite poor form **_if_** he hadn't explained everything beforehand about the scar and everything else. He had kept it aside for me before we went after that locket."

"Those memories were to give him hope that he would live on," Dumbledore explained. "He had faith in me, and sending him to die without knowing everything, without hope, without the training required to defeat Voldemort with your help, or without the training to **_live_** in a world beyond Voldemort would have been the height of betrayal. In spite of the killing curse he would live; he had to. It was the most painless and surest way of freeing him that I knew. He was necessary for two reasons: I love the magical world, and it needs him; it always will. And I have always loved him more than a master loves his pupil, as I have come to love you all. For his own sake I wanted him to live; as I hope he now can."

"I didn't trust Albus' optimism," grumbled Severus. "I feared that the Dark Lord would prise it all out of the boy's mind. And I really feared for the lives of you all."

"Well, a full disclosure about what should be done, and your attempts at convincing Tom into the opposite of what you were saying did help," Harry replied with a smile. "Your role was a secret to me as well though."

There was a short bout of silence, before Minerva cleared her throat and spoke, "The obvious next step, is to decide the next step. To that end, I would like to commend your team," she said to the youngsters. "It was set up differently to what we were accustomed to, but it as effective in the way you all operated. To that end, I would like to propose a transfer of leadership. You all are the Order now. We are the old guard, the ones you can call upon for advice and help at a moment's notice."

"Thank you," spoke Theo. "We shall strive to ensure that your faith in us is not misplaced."

"You already have proven yourselves," Kingsley said with equanimity. "All of you; we trust you all for who **_you_** are."

"Well, now that we have all had a good time being good to each other, perhaps we could actually get something done," Daphne sneered. It was perhaps a function of being a Potioneer, this sneering thing.

Everyone responded with fond smiles and eye-rolls.

"What do you say we do then?" asked Neville.

"It all started with the Prophecy. I am sure you Gryffindors have no sense of caution, but I would like to have a guarantee that Riddle is gone."

"That is...right." There was an awkward silence as everyone realised that Daphne had just poked the elephant in the room. It was at the back of everyone's minds, but nobody wanted to touch the subject.

The Slytherin though, adroitly changed the subject. "Till we go there though, I have plans for the castle. We will have to reconstruct it."

"And I think that the money from the Dark Lord's coffers should be redistributed through trusts. It was ill-gotten, but we are not distributing it willy-nilly to the poor. It should be to necessities, and through food, water and medical aid," Neville put forth. "Sorry Theo."

"No problem, mate. The bastard spent all the Nott family money anyway after he murdered Dad for having a blood-traitor son and for failing to bring in the Prophecy. Or maybe he had one of the Malfoys do it."

"At least **_you_** got to purge that filth from your home," muttered Neville.

"I do appreciate the idea of pest control," Theo replied with a vicious grin.

"So we pool the money," interrupted Hermione, as ever the obsessive planner, "set side twenty percent for the families of the Death Eaters to use, but under stipulations, since apart from Theo, I don't really know of any Death Eater kin who were not sane, innocent and in general..."

"Good," completed the rest of the table in unison.

"Well, yes," agreed Hermione, foregoing the diplomacy. She wasn't too keen about finding an alternative word at that moment. "Then we would need a substantial conversion, since it would be better to get food from the non-magicals at the moment, given how the prices there are roughly a fifth of what they are in magical shops, and the same goes for clothing. Most of the potions resources..."

"On that note, Hermione, I have good news," interrupted Remus. "Sirius and I called in our contacts the night before last. We will have a steady source of moderate quality and fairly useful stuff at eighty percent of the going price. We got some samples and we have forwarded them to Daphne's lab."

"I checked a few," Daphne allowed. "They are acceptable. You may procure the ingredients."

"That's one part done," Hermione said with a sigh of relief as she ticked an item off the list she had made.

"We can get Dad's construction crews here. They will be happy to help, given how he had them all hidden and protected, irrespective of their race of beings," Padma added. "So that's another item, provisionally."

"And our greenhouses are capable of providing the better quality materials at cost or less for the most important potions," put in Neville.

"And my team and I were all practically unscathed. So we will take up the rehabilitation and healthcare duties. We already have electrolyte solutions ready, as well as clean water and several first aid potions," Hannah reported. "Moreover, we have been regularly going into the non-magical side to ensure healing for those cursed and still alive. We were able to save a few."

Everyone nodded in appreciation. Several of the older members assigned themselves to the various work crews voluntarily as well. The Order had turned paramilitary during the last phase of the war, making kills, mostly ascribed to the two most fearsome and vicious Hunters, the departed Ron Weasley and of course, Harry Potter. In the end, only one half of that pair was left. And this half was silent about the true nature of the Order – that about the humanitarian volunteer workers. This one person had been conspicuously silent through this work allocation. So obviously everyone turned to him expectantly.

"I will help wherever you all shall need me, in whatever way you need me to. My priority, however, will be ensuring law and order, at this point," Harry slowly said, cleaning his glasses with in a deliberate contemplative action. "We are not secure. Our victory was attained at great cost, and it is, at best tenuous. Several Death Eaters are still at large. And they are not the only criminal elements in society. The desperate do and will turn to crime. Fenrir may be dead, but there will be others to take up his mantle. A lot of the Death Eaters' rot lies buried, spreading. It must be exposed, and destroyed.

"All humanitarian work has to be accompanied by peace-keeping task forces. The Ministry is in shambles. If Kingsley, as the senior-most living member of the DMLE, agrees, then at this point, I intend to pick volunteers from among the people, and ensure security. Till we can stand again, we will have to be the police and the judiciary. It wouldn't take a lot for things to escalate from petty crimes to mob violence in places like Knockturn Alley and spread thenceforth."

As much as people were demoralised by the idea of potentially more fighting, there was no way to disagree with that. It was the harsh truth of a post-war society, no matter how great or otherwise its former state was.

"There is however, another aspect to this. Throughout history, revolutionaries became respected protectors and overreached the ambit of their designated roles and abused the power they were trusted with. We need the Order to keep a check on us. For this, we cannot be a part of it, at least not in any form of leadership. The temptation of doing something for the people's own good even if they don't like it will grow great. I will not fall to it."

A stunned silence followed that pronouncement.

"You mean to leave the Order?" asked Minerva weakly.

"No. The policing force will be acting in lieu of a functioning government. We have to be answerable to someone, and that someone has to be the Order, which will interact with the magical public the most. Till that situation persists, I cannot be a part of the Order. Consider it a temporary leave."

Nobody replied for some time. Then, the portrait of Dumbledore spoke, "I have great hopes of you, Harry Potter. You are taking a wise decision – I cannot commend it enough."

Harry nodded once at the portrait.

No decision was taken immediately, but the way ahead was clearer than before.

At that moment, though, the Fat Friar appeared at Minerva's side. "My Lady Headmistress, a muggle has somehow broken through our repellent ward. She is, even as we speak, observing this meeting, from the behind the pillars overlooking this hall – the one to which all voices carry."

A frown graced the faces of everyone, before Harry conjured a sheet of paper and a pencil.

"Mr. Friar, how do you know it is a muggle?"

"I passed through her. She never saw me, nor did she hear me speak, asking her who she was."

A grim expression came over the young man's face. "Get one of the elves to stun her," he wrote. "We must attend to this intruder."

* * *

A red-headed woman in a tight black jumpsuit was observing the destruction that had been wrought. Agent Natasha Romanoff had been tasked with tracking the source of the frequency that had been registered by S.H.E.I.L.D.'s technologies – very primitive, in reality, enough only to tell them that something of interest had occurred. Her secondary task was that of reconnaissance and profiling of any individuals in the area.

Thrice, she had attempted to enter the ruins where the traces of very high energy releases, which, to her, were the logical source of the high frequency in the otherwise desolate area, and thrice she had somehow lost her way. She was not cleared for the National Secrets Level 2M/MACUSA and above, which would have told her about magic. As it was, the muggle repellent ward that covered the ruins kept her at bay.

It wasn't until she saw a tall dark-skinned man with an earring in a red dress entering the place before disappearing that she realised there was something else at play. The woman was superlatively trained. The ruins – or rather the firm idea that she was looking at ruins – was the problem. So she cleared her head of all thoughts and firming herself walked through.

They really were ruins after all – just recently created ones. She felt something cold pass through her. It was as if it was a presence. She cautiously looked around. There was nobody there. It left her with a strange sense of foreboding.

She took to the shadows. Seeing how there were very few standing areas in the place, which was obviously where the red-robed man would be, she took to the partially destroyed areas and kept to the shadows, as she crouched towards the main building, what must once have been a magnificent old Scottish castle. Eventually she entered it at a higher level than ground and came upon a set of pillars which overlooked what must have once been a large hall. There was quite a party there. Knowing the acoustics of old stone castles like these, she tested her positions cautiously till she came upon one from where she could hear quite surprisingly much.

The sensor spiked as she held it over the meeting. Whoever these people were, they were more than just of cursory interest. The words she was hearing, though told a story of their own. There had been a war. This group had won. Were they talking of magic? Was it a cult? The blonde girl of barely eighteen spoke of healing people on both sides of the magic. So they weren't attacking based on power. And there was that term – Death Eaters.

And there were actual portraits talking!

Most importantly, the man, Harry Potter, made a sensible decision – quite unlike despots that she had known. He exuded power. He was definitely someone the colonel had to know about. And then he waved his stick – a wand, probably – and conjured paper and a pencil out of thin air! What was this? She hadn't ever encountered anything like this before.

She never had time to make the next observations, as a small creature suddenly appeared next to her, and her vision faded to black.

* * *

"Enervate," Hannah firmly said, pointing her wand at the woman. Harry quickly had her in shackles – magically strong and enough to ensure that she wouldn't escape by any means.

Natasha played possum. She needed to know about her situation first.

"I know you aren't still unconscious," a strong female voice said. "I have had my share of people who tried to find out more about the situation first."

With an exaggerated sigh, Natasha looked at her captors.

"Who are you?"

"Hmm... shackles?" purred Natasha. "Is this some group _game_ or something? Not that I mind, but I rather bat for the other team, if you get my drift. I rather would have that group of young men there to be my...playmates."

"Ah...cue the sexual innuendo," growled the half-metallic man. Natasha could admit that he was handsome. "As if we haven't experienced worse," he scoffed. "Forget it Bones. Tear through her mind and find out."

"She is a muggle, Sirius," the old woman chastised.

"She is a muggle who broke through our wards, Minerva. As old Alastor used to say, **CONSTANT VIGILANCE!** " barked he.

"I agree," said her interrogator calmly.

Natasha was about to roll her eyes. She was expecting being strapped to some table with some chants instead of a machine. What did these people think? It had been tried on er countless times. The next moment, she was shocked. Every memory from her childhood to the last minute before she was caught flashed before her eyes.

"She is one Agent Natasha Romanoff, of an American Agency called the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division, also known as S.H.I.E.L.D. They detected something different at the precise moment that Harry defeated Voldemort. She has a sensor on her that brought her here, and specifically to something that Harry now has, it seems. She knows about a secret device of some sort – a blue stone called a Tesseract – even though she doesn't have any clearance for it. She was a former spy for something called the KGB, a Russian agency in a cold war, and has since turned coat and works for the Americans. We are all, and obviously Harry especially, persons of interest. She is not cleared to know about magic."

Nobody spoke for a while. Then Harry stepped up to the bound woman and her captor before politely asking, "May I, Susan?"

"Yes Harry."

Harry looked at her grimly, staring her in the eye. He summoned the sensor which immediately started going wild. It was not rated for such high exposure. Predictably, it was destroyed.

"She must not remember. But they have to know not to pursue us."

"Obliviation and a letter?" asked Kingsley.

"We will just obliviate her," Harry replied grimly. "We might have to reprimand the MACUSA for not curbing such voyeuristic tendencies, though."

"That will set the Kneazle among the snitches," agreed Kingsley. "I am licensed for this, Harry."

* * *

Three days later, Natasha woke up in a hospital. She couldn't, for the life of her, understand how a woman of her skills lost her footing from the stairs.

Colonel Fury was sitting in a chair by her bedside.

"Something is wrong," she reported with a frown.

"It very much is, Agent Romanoff."

"What really happened to me?"

"What happened to you is that you earned yourself a promotion, with a clearance level 1M/MACUSA."

"Thank you Colonel. May I know the reason for this appreciation of my job?"

"You will, once you are released."

* * *

"You do not feel confident Harry," Hermione said as she and Sirius accompanied him to the Department of Mysteries.

"Whatever happened with that Agent Romanoff is giving me a bad feeling, Hermione. I don't like it."

"You think the Americans are after Voldemort too?"

"No. Worse..."

"The Muggle governments?" prompted Sirius.

"No. Even worse..."

"What could be worse?" asked Sirius. "Voldemort is dead. It was confirmed. I can't see what can now happen."

"We shall know soon."

And know they did, soon.

They had first gone to the registry of magical deaths and births. They had known Voldemort – or, as he was formally known to the registers – Tom Marvolo Riddle was alive before. And now he was dead.

In the Department of Mysteries though, Harry's gut dropped as it was proven right.

The Prophecy still glowed blue.


	3. Unseen Possibilities

**Unseen Possibilities**

A/N: Thanks to all readers, favourite-markers and followers and the reviewers: twilliams1797 (who caught a rather horrendous typo which MS Word didn't), stars90, and THE BLACK PRINCE OF DARKNESS.

 **Please read this A/N.**

There is slight Harmony, as hinted in the previous chapter, but it is certainly not the focus of the story. It is because I see the two as having a relation somewhere between Steve Rodgers/Peggy Carter and Tony/Pepper. So bear with it, even if you detest it. If it troubles you too much, assume any other character that you want there. It won't make a lick of a difference to the crossover part of the story. So a clarification:

 **Did I kill Ron to facilitate Harmony?** No. Captain America has Bucky Barnes. Iron Man has Colonel Rhodes, the War Machine. The Master of **_Death_** has Ron. Make of that what you will.

 **Is Dumbledore to be bashed?** No. Harry regards the man as his mentor, and accepts him with his decisions, his success and failures and lies and truth and understands that sometimes hard things have to be done, even that which is wrong in every way, if only to facilitate a greater success, much like Nick Fury and the Captain America cards. Indeed, he understands the need to emulate him if need be. Sirius and Remus, and many of Harry's closer friends are ambivalent about the man. Hermione despises him. Gienah has grudging respect. However, he is the cause of the problem, his truly good intentions and a very human failing of sentiment and attachment notwithstanding.

 **Will there be any slash?** No. Most definitely not.

Unless my muse manages to surprise me, I hope this will be the last Author's Note.

* * *

"This is a joke, right?" Sirius asked as he stared – or rather, glared – at the offending ball of what looked like glass.

"It most assuredly is not," the Unspeakable who accompanied them sniffed in annoyance. "We among the Unspeakables believe that the Prophecy never was related only to Mr. Potter, or Lord Voldemort, for that matter. We were vindicated in our beliefs when we found the Prophesy already reformed by the time we cleared the mess you made fighting over it."

"What do you mean only to me and Riddle?"

"The prophesy orbs record prophesies that may be true for any being of any species across the Universe – we, as our muggle counterparts believe there may be alien life-forms and since this may eventually affect you, given the people that SHIELD associates with, I break no confidences when I say that we have been trying to reach out to aliens ourselves. Prophesies can be simultaneously true for many, many possibilities. In fact, I would advise you against attempting to touch that orb at all. The results may be disastrous for you."

"Why did you not tell us all this before?" demanded Harry angrily.

"Lord Voldemort – for after his resurrection, even though he shared the same soul as Tom Riddle, we ceased to consider him the same person..."

The Unspeakable was bodily lifted off the ground by Sirius with his metallic arm. "Who died then?" he asked in a dangerously low voice. "Who actually died? Why have you lot listed things as you have? Is Lord Voldemort dead? You will get me the confirmation, right now. Otherwise, I will unleash untold terrors here. Do not forget, the Blacks have contributed to this Department a lot, but you don't know everything I do, and all that is mine by magic."

"Really, Black?" a snide female voice startled them all, as they were all suspended in a localised anti-gravity field. "Are you really attacking my people in my department?"

"Corvus," spat Sirius. "Used any more unwitting teenagers to end wars lately, especially such wars that you should have been stopping given what we found out about _his_ methods?"

"What do you mean?" asked Hermione fearfully.

"What I mean is that they could have stopped the War with many of the magics they hide in the bowels of the Ministry. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually turned out to be helping Voldemort."

They fell to the ground painfully and suddenly as gravity asserted again. Then Corvus crouched at Sirius' face and lowered the cowl. She was a woman. And not just any woman; she was most clearly a Black. "How many of my family members are going to accuse me of working for the other side, nephew?"

"Your neutrality, and that of your precious department has always been dubious, _Aunt_ Gienah."

"That is because none of you, for all your pitiful attempts at cunning, have ever mastered the art of asking the right questions. Indeed, in spite of never swearing by Slytherin and cunning and ambition and all that rot that my dear parents and brother swore by – as if it were some symbol of the ultimate truth and not just a school house which never means anything beyond it – you had come closest to gaining fruitful knowledge from me."

"Your Aunt is the Head of the Unspeakables?"

"Yes. That's a woman who wouldn't be bothered to help me when I was put in jail, in spite of her extra-judiciary dispensations, which she could have used to simply get me a trial."

"When it got me such a wonderful person to experiment on?" Gienah asked innocently, "How could I?"

"That's it! How could you?" asked Hermione indignantly. She was after all, not a stranger to the moral ambiguity that some nations indulged in by using criminals in medical trials. That the people in question were related to such a great degree irked her even more. Family was supposed to look out for each other!

"That's not the right question," Gienah cackled gleefully, reminding everyone that she was related to Bellatrix too.

She was, however, still under scrutiny from Harry.

"I am no Ravenclaw, but I think that the correct questions would be what experiments did you conduct, why, and what effects they would have on Sirius."

Gienah stared at Harry through her grey eyes and then cracked another grin. "Even distant though you are, you got something good from the Black Side, boy."

She waved her hand at them, and suddenly they realised that they were too firmly under Gravity's effect that their efforts to get up had hurt too.

"Come," she ordered, while also ordering the Minion who had been chaperoning them to the records department. "We have a lot to discuss, nephew, and you to Great Saviour," she added with a rather salacious wink and tone, one that made all three of her visitors go green. It offended the woman. "Now, do not go around thinking that my age has dulled my needs! All I would need is some de-aging potion, or some Polyjuice, and you, Mr. Potter, are one delicious man."

"I suppose I should thank you for the offer, but you are too closely related, your entrancing beauty notwithstanding."

Gienah cackled again.

Presently, the minion returned, this time with a sheet which he presented to his boss. "Hmmm... let's see. Tom Marvolo Riddle, disembodied on 31st October, 1981, possessed one Terry Forks, aged three months, killed by Harry Potter on the 2nd of May, 1998. No remainder of the soul exists on the mortal plane. You are in the clear," she declared. "Are you happy now?"

"As much as we can dare to be," Harry allowed. "With our world in dire straits as it is now, do you not see how that would terrify us? Even you must see that we cannot survive another of these Dark Lords, and I am not going to destroy a child's life over something that has plagued mine."

Gienah's demeanour became decidedly sober. "You are right, Harry – may I call you that?" At his nod, she continued, "So you must see why we had to be seen as neutral."

"Interesting," Harry immediately remarked. "You said you had to be _seen_ as neutral. You didn't say you had to _be_ neutral."

The woman was a real switch. She seemed to flip moods and expressions in the blink of an eye, as she went from sober to beaming at Harry. "That's right, boy. Wayward ministers don't assassinate themselves. Random fatal explosions when the Dark Lord's servants are experimenting don't organise themselves." Then she scowled. "There are many areas of research we work on, Harry. One of the ways to ensure that Voldemort never got his hands on them was to root out all his people here, and then enforce Vows and neutrality. We had to pretend that some things never existed, that we hadn't even thought of those avenues of research. One doesn't always fight despots head on. Information control is just as important."

"I understand," Harry allowed. "So, let's get back to another important matter. What _did_ you do to Sirius?"

"You don't think being an animagus alone could have saved you, Siri?" Gienah asked softly. "You were dying, and people were content to let that be. We are considered all sorts of things. Letting us use you was something they found great joy in. Your constitution is different as compared to a normal magical now, Sirius. Bellatrix's curse should have killed you."

"Oh."

There was a pregnant silence in the room, which Hermione finally broke. "Why are you volunteering information? I would think that you face such fairly rudimentary questions often enough."

Gienah beamed at the girl. "You recently ran into one very interesting individual. Natasha Romanoff, I believe."

"How'd you know?" Sirius blurted out. The woman ignored him.

"Tesseract," Hermione guessed correctly. "You already knew of the Tesseract."

"Very good," Gienah commended. "Those fools are harbouring something that shall destroy our very planet. We know for sure that it was one of the things that one of Hitler's associates, whom we shall keep unnamed for the time being as he is of no real consequence, was part of, and the leader of the organisation known as the HYDRA. We had recorded a streak of very high energy, including thaumatic energy streaking across the sky towards the end of the Grindelwald war. We had chosen to leave things be for the time being, but that idiot Howard Stark recovered it."

"Why would you leave it?"

"It is dangerous – and not only because we don't know enough about it. Think, Sirius, why would we want something that opened a portal so similar to the Veil of Death, but active and far more powerful, out where everyone could find it and accidentally trigger it? That those Americans haven't is pure luck, no matter how much they boast about their technology – muggle technology, that eventually has become inadequate to handle the thaumatic surges."

"But you should have recovered it first," argued Hermione.

"It was a miscalculation," Gienah admitted. "My predecessor's predecessor, the one in charge then, admitted as much. Thereafter we could hardly steal it from them."

"You said it has become thaumatically unstable," Sirius noted.

"It must have. You see, we recorded the same signature that was recorded then, at the precise moment of Harry's defeat of Voldemort. It is a simple matter of extrapolation, thereafter, along with two more in-phase pulses. Why else would they send Romanoff here but to investigate?"

"You mean, I am related to that thing, somehow?"

"It is the most logical inference."

"And when does the shoe drop, then?"

"Right now," she answered and waited. When nothing happened, she added for dramatic effect with arms spread wide, "Or never." Pinned by three glares which she could easily dismiss like a three-year-old's temper tantrum, she wearily pointed out, "That's what I told you about the Prophecy. You simply cannot know for sure. The best you _can_ do is to ensure that you do not fit any of the conditions – neither the Dark Lord nor the saviour."

Harry gruffly nodded. "What would that mean doing, though?"

"At the moment, that would mean rehabilitating our part of the world. It's not just charity, but also caution and vigilance which begin at home."

"We are working on that. It's the external threats that worry us now."

"SHIELD will make another overture," she assured them. "It may not be immediate, but we will need both researchers and field agents. We need to have a similar agency."

"You'd liaise with the muggles?"

"If need be, we shall."

"You said you recorded _two_ pulses," Hermione spoke up, drawing attention to something that Gienah had said. "What's the other one?"

"Sure you are not a Black, girl?" the old witch asked. "Finding what the other pulse was is precisely one of our objectives, for which we need a SHIELD-like agency." She observed Hermione speculatively for long enough to make her uncomfortable, when Sirius cleared his throat. "But now that you are here, I need to find out what exactly happened when you defeated Riddle and you became the Master of Death."

Hermione and Sirius stood up with their wands drawn and were summarily frozen in place with nary a glance by Gienah. It took Harry several deep breaths and moments to control his anger at that and his panic (that she had known of) to control a similar reaction. He was in her power here.

"You are certainly more sensible than them, I will give you that."

"You have already shown us that we are in your power. I can hardly trust you, but I cannot do anything about it either," Harry tightly replied.

"No you can't," agreed Gienah simply.

"Would you be so kind as to release them?"

"Should I?"

"What could they do to you?"

"What indeed..."

The two were not even given a second glance as they staggered upon being freed.

Harry told her the story as perfunctorily as he could, giving her the barest essentials, enough to not provoke further questions, but also not enough to have all of any of those that she did have answered. The objective was to get out of this place as fast as possible. He had to be answerable to the Order? Hah! The true centre of magical power stood here, letting everyone else delude themselves otherwise.

"So becoming the Master of Death was the trigger, the acquisition of the wand itself, that is. We did try to ensure that it would pass on undefeated."

That stunned Harry.

"You did?"

"Yes. Think of it Harry," Gienah seriously pointed out, "it was a myth, and even in the magical world, some myths are supposed to remain just that – myths. Nobody, **_nobody_** , is meant to wield the kind of power that this implies. Can we know for sure what it will do to you? Or where it truly originated from? Or what it will force you to do? What its true meaning is? We wanted this power broken altogether. And in spite of our best efforts, we never knew where these things were." She peered at him closely; her face taking on a look more suited to a Veela's other form. "You have only begun to imagine what we can do and what we might know, and how dangerous we might be. What does it tell you that our concerted efforts to force this particular myth to remain one failed?"

Harry could do no more than curse his luck as he realised that he was, once again, in dire straits. And he could only know there lurked a danger, but not know what it was.


	4. Altered Paths

**Altered Paths**

Thanks to all readers, favouriteers, followers and the reviewers Silvermane1 and Artimuos Jackson. This is a bit rushed, but I do want this story to get on to the events of the Avengers fast. Even if you hate Harmony, I can only promise that I have attempted to not have it grate on your nerves.

* * *

Time Leap: Year 2006

* * *

Eight years on, the magical world in Britain had changed. It most definitely had. It was not a Utopian society, that was true – and thankfully so. It had lots of tiffs and squabbles and the stuff. But none of that resulted in indiscriminate murder. The rule of law was obeyed with iron willed enforcement. Under the rule of Kingsley Shacklebolt, the Minister for Magic who took over after three years from the Ministerial Council in a planned transition, and under the five year reign over DMLE of Harry, Kingsley's second-in-command at the time of the transition not by choice, but by demand, Magical Britain had turned into a **_functioning_** society.

Revolts had been quashed – sometimes by force, and often by threat, because irrespective of who stages revolts, and for what revolts are staged, they impede any form of rebuilding and progress.

And that included some _enthusiastic_ protest rallies by bunches of idiots, the ever-present apologists for terrorists, who masqueraded as intellectuals and opposed permanent solutions to long-term cancerous problems like arrested Death Eaters who had escaped before. Candlelight marches and loud denouncing of death sentences for "mislead and misguided people" were roundly ignored, often led by the muggle-born spouting stupid quotes by muggle people and leaders who "chose the peaceful path", shouting slogans in support of human rights, and all that bovine excrement. Security being a responsibility and not a right is easily lost on people.

Cherry-picked open interrogations after thorough checking for any and all forms of memory-blocking or modifications and mind-control swayed the public squarely by the side of the new regime. Public opinion is where the rulers can truly hold sway, after all. Stupid "humanitarian" fringe extremists – and they do become extremists – need to only be soundly and conclusively defeated once in the collective mind of the society.

Neo-Death Eater uprisings were ruthlessly destroyed, as were vengeful actions by the muggleborn and half-bloods who thought of themselves as revolutionaries (justice and law and order, after all, are preserved if and only if the law is equal for all) – and the offenders were brought in front of a court that was designed to not fall prey to corruption (for the most part). It was not the failed society that Harry had known through his time till the War ended. Rebuilding was a tough job. It could be done only once and it had to be done right.

There was some criticism about authoritarianism, but then again, the rebels without a cause, as well as the ones who sought peace without the price it exacts weren't and aren't endemic to the magical world alone.

But just as law and order was the biggest priority, so too was stabilising the economy, which had crashed as many of the middle-class had been targeted or had fled, as always the one economic class crushed by governments wanting to be seen working for the poor which never truly defining income in ways to define true poverty, while kow-towing to varying lobbies of the rich. Magical Britain had the simplicity of the corrupt government, caricaturishly corrupt business doyens and the terrorists all neatly being the same and one single oppressive team, but that's beside the point.

Anyway, the middle-class included the people who were targeted by the Death Eaters for trading with those of the blood profile they wanted to eliminate, or who had been targeted for being half-bloods or muggle-born themselves, or who had had their businesses destroyed for non-cooperation. This was also the class of the people who really didn't have a bone to pick with anyone, paid a majority of the taxes, and did not have the multitude of sources that some did, but also did not escape the tax benefits that people like even the Weasleys enjoyed.

They were given the capital through funds created from the confiscated monies of Death Eaters under a panel directed by Neville and aided by Theo Nott. There were many people whose businesses were re-established and were now fuelling the stable society. While this move was derided as a "Muggle Communist ideal", in truth, it was one of the easiest ways to repurpose blood money and keep tabs on the most likely sources of vengeful trouble. Capitalism or communism, in any case are simply words, neither of which are quite really useful, and which by themselves, certainly don't put food on the table or pay the bills. Those are but concepts that the idle discuss to their hearts' content. The Sheriff of Nottingham was no good, but so also, a poorer role model than Robin Hood could not be imagined.

The panel's main job was to ensure that the money was not taken in a ham-fisted, heavy-handed manner. Many Death Eaters had children under the age of fifteen. Where possible, welfare schemes were set up to ensure that a sense of hatred against those that took away their family wealth was not engendered while whitewashing the source of the money and the crimes of their parents, and that a feeling of being disenfranchised did not come up. So extending Wealth Management Schemes to stabilise the wealth of such families was also imperative.

It was even worse where the actions could not be explained to small children, many even recently orphaned. There was no law to not tell a child biased truth – no sane society can rule so. That left the quandary – how do you go about telling a child that their parent (or parents) was a terrorist, and that a part of the accrued wealth, sometimes by means unspeakably foul, needed to be repurposed to right the wrongs, especially when they were likely to have technically innocent relatives sympathetic to the Death Eater cause on hand to teach them otherwise? For all that the Death Eaters were terrorists they were loving parents to the children as well.

And how indeed to go about judging what was blood money, and what wasn't? It was an arduous task that needed a thorough understanding of statistics regarding actual trade, several projections regarding interests and business turnovers before an agreeable sum could be arrived at on a case-to-case basis. Theo and Neville walked the tightrope admirably well, however.

Education too was restructured, almost entirely under the stewardship of Remus, Minerva and the able posthumous guidance of Dumbledore through his portrait. Many new courses geared towards the professions that were rising and important and guaranteed to help people earn money were at the forefront. At the same time, the History courses were updated to show the devastation that war caused. And Harry had personally been invested in ensuring that that part of the history was not biased into whitewashing the actions of the victors. Progress and rehabilitation have to be all-inclusive.

So, by the time Harry quit from the DMLE, having installed infrastructure, and having goaded as many people as he could to institute a true Constitution for the Magical Parliament to adhere to when making or amending laws – thereby demonstrating his influence, as well as demonstrating his power through field actions – his name was taken with the same reverence as his mentor, Albus Dumbledore. And rightly so; by the age of just twenty-three, he had won a war, destroyed a Dark Lord, earned a Masters in Defence, and had helped restructure society without having to resort to a vendetta-type witch hunt.

Poverty still remained for some, but that was offset by accurate census and statistics to ensure that targeted policies reached these people even if it did not pull them out of poverty. There were still darker elements in the society, but they were monitored and they harboured a healthy fear of the law. Crime had not been wiped out, but it was not so dire as to keep the DMLE in a state of heightened alarm. These factors were as existent as any other place of earth. But they were not as rife as they had been.

In all this, Harry had maintained a partnership, tenuous as it was with Gienah Black, better known as Unspeakable Corvus. Her department had been the last resort for particularly severe situations and uncooperative suspects at the outset. They scared him, and especially the unfulfilled prophecy, which Corvus never failed to mention in their monthly clandestine meetings. It was the one thing that was as regular as sunrise, along with her teasing and flirting, which intimidated the young man further, and disgusted him in equal measure.

But that changed after the terrorist attacks in the USA in September 2001. All of a sudden, the worries of external terror, the added strain of war declared in alliance with the Americans, and a demand for people by the mundane government for the same made it doubly difficult for them all. A few muggle-borns did choose the country first, but Magical Britain as a whole was not very convinced. A residue of isolationism, and lingering irritation at the muggles not adhering to some basic strictures discussed by Kingsley during the war against Voldemort were the chief causes. They had needed help which was denied then. The muggle view of isolating the problems to the magical world, and hoping that they would all take care of each other – in a possibly bloody, lasting manner – rankled with people like Kingsley and Remus and many others.

As a token of assistance, however, they stepped up for internal security. Legillimency on new visa applicants was far from legal and was fraught with diplomatic challenges, but they stayed firm, and got on with it.

And that was where the Americans got involved, again.

To cut a long story short, the ageless Natasha Romanoff, lured from the Russians completely, was now as close to the Girl Friday among field agents for Colonel Fury as could be. However, his unilateral decision to promote her and grant her the knowledge of the magical world did not sit well with the MACUSA, and it paved the way for magical interference in the operations of S.H.I.E.L.D. These were the people involved in resolving the matter of a suspect who had used the USA as a route to get into the UK and had been detained. That the suspect was a magical who complained to the MACUSA (quite a bit foolishly, considering that the MACUSA itself was not impressed with the results of the search) meant that there was considerable friction between the allies.

The ensuing diplomatic wrangles had been only resolved when a high-level meeting between Kingsley, the Prime Minister, the Home Ministry, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Magic agreed upon a joint taskforce in line with S.H.I.E.L.D. and having representative agents from both the magical and mundane parts of both countries. Harry was inducted at a high level due to his experiences with the absurd and dangerous – and because he was more expendable to the Prime Minister than any other soldier who would be better deployed in Central Asia and Iraq and other regions at war.

Harry was sure that the Americans had a Hermione replica as he had a throwback to SPEW. Having heard them use the term so many times, he wondered whether that was what they really thought of the uneasy alliance that had been forced upon them all. The new agency was called the **S** pecial e **N** forcement **A** nd **F** ield **U** nit, or as the internet-savvy bunch sniggered at lately, S.N.A.F.U. It was not easy sailing on that front.

It was, at the end of the day, statecraft, a matter with no allies, only common interests. A united front to the world hid several bumps and bruises.

But if that was bad, Harry was actually in much deeper trouble. People only chalked it down to work stress as he was visible on several fronts when he started pulling away from his friends, and it was visibly true for the later part of the first six years till 2004. Sirius and Remus tried to talk to him, more than anyone else, but they figured that he needed time and tried and failed to otherwise keep his spirits up. Things were getting bad, especially with the people around him.

* * *

"Hermione?" called out Neville cautiously, as he saw her sitting morosely by the drinks table at Theo Nott and Sarah McDowell's wedding. His wife, Daphne, prodded him on. The absurd pair that they were, cold, cutting Daphne and sweet, sometimes fumbling, but brave and stalwart fighter Neville, they always struck Hermione as a very well-suited couple, though that defied any manner of logic.

"Neville, Daphne," acknowledged Hermione. She managed a very good approximation of cheerfulness, but it still seemed strained.

"Harry's not going to come is he?" Daphne asked, cutting straight to the point, if only with kindness that seemed to have been Neville's mellowing effect.

"He will," refuted Hermione vehemently.

"Please, Hermione, don't try to make excuses for him or lie for him. We know," Neville firmly stated. His own display of a spine was a reflection of Daphne's influence. Then he sighed. "He didn't come to our wedding. He won't come today. We should have realised. Each of us broke away from responsibilities and became teenagers, and we admired him for his dedication to our world as he sank deeper and deeper into work, when we should have been helping him do the same. We are losing him."

"He is just locked up with the new demands with the war," Hermione weakly defended.

"Hermione, please," Daphne cut across. "We know him. War will not leave him, or he it. He has started to revel in it."

Hermione said nothing. There was only so much she could say against that.

"Just, just tell him that if he needs us, if he wishes to be back among the living – not the merely surviving – then we will be there, always," Neville promised.

She only managed a pained smile.

* * *

More and more, Harry was becoming estranged from everyone, and more and more, it was becoming patently visible that it was not just work, but something else at play. But nobody truly knew what to make of it all. What with the unpredictable mood swings, and his emulation of rabid, cornered animals every so often, there were more than just his friends who saw the possibility of Harry snapping. He had more than his share of detractors, many referring to his and Ron's strike team and openly wondering when he would go on a rampage. It wasn't helped by the SNAFU keeping tabs and calling upon him to help for absolutely meaningless things – including minor bank heists by enhanced individuals, or even for idle time and monthly briefings.

When, however, Harry nearly emulated Vernon Dursley while reacting to Teddy doing something that he had done so often before – playing with his cloak – Remus drew the line and barred Harry, a boy whom he considered as good as a son, from meeting Teddy. It was fortunately only a week before he was scheduled to meet Gienah.

* * *

"You look tensed up," Gienah observed, not looking up from the tome she was studying in minute detail, particularly the jottings in the blank spaces.

"You should be too," Harry grunted at the creepy old woman, the Chief Unspeakable who was his unofficial mentor for his second Mastery, Enchanting – a multidisciplinary topic that involved many different magical topics and was not exactly defined by scope. "They are putting pressure on Kingsley to get us to share some of our findings. Bloody Americans," he grunted again.

"This isn't from the SNAFU, is it?"

"Not that I know of," Harry answered. "If there are any magical members, I have not been put into contact with them."

"MACUSA has a long history of being worse meddlers than Dumbledore. You just know an organisation is bad when they make elaborate Heath Robinson designs for execution mechanisms."

"Dumbledore meddled because he needed to," Harry pointed out. "Till Fudge went out in that blaze of disgrace exposing the strings of his masters – thanks again for that by the way – there was no good counter except for the Headmaster."

Gienah huffed but agreed. Everyone needed one figure to be inviolate, to look up to, and to trust. For better or for worse, Harry had chosen Dumbledore. He certainly could have done worse, though she personally didn't care for the man. "So how's the family?" she demanded.

"Do you really need me to tell you? Sirius is scoring women and has been going around with the story that he will end up fathering half-human cyborgs – a muggle term..."

"I know."

"...to avoid getting married," Harry continued. "Teddy sent me on a wild goose chase the other day when he impersonated Remus so well, that I believed the story of Teddy wandering off by himself and not returning, you have Hermione squirreled away somewhere, so I haven't talked to her in a week – or indeed for the past two years."

"Is she still badgering you?"

Harry declined to comment.

"Come now, Harry, live a little. She is willing, and has been your friend. And please don't give me that bullshit about losing her friendship..."

"You know full well that such a flimsy excuse is not mine to make. You know why. I have tried to explain why to her, but neither of you listen."

"I have told you that keeping your life on hold and held hostage by something which may not come to pass is sheer stupidity."

"You don't believe it either," Harry retorted. "And well..."

"What?" Gienah looked up interestedly. She might tease the boy a lot, but he was Sirius' family and as much as she intimidated Sirius, and Harry with the creepy old aunt act, she would always look out for them all.

"You'll laugh."

"There's someone else?"

"Merlin, no!" exclaimed Harry. "I would never turn her down for someone else. It would be so easy to go along with it, never mind the fact that she is an anchor to reality for me. It's just..."

The reticence that Harry now spoke with was tinged with something she had not seen Harry exhibit often, and therefore all the more alarming – fear.

"Harry?"

"I can feel it. Whatever that thing is, I can feel it, like being awake when a Lethifold steals over you, looking at a shadow as it looms over, while you remain helpless to stop it."

Gienah didn't laugh. She snapped the tome closed and focussed her attention completely on Harry. "Harry, what are you saying?"

"It just makes no sense, Gienah. Those Americans and their games, the muggle war which we **_have_** to help with, the SNAFU, it makes me uneasy. But the absolute worst thing is my new habit. You have read the Lord of the Rings?"

"Yes, the closest thing to blasting apart the Statute of Secrecy with Dark Magic of all things; of course I have."

"You know how both Bilbo and Frodo became possessive of the Ring?"

"Yes?"

"The Hallows are that way. And even now, I know that you have done something to make me trust you, and you're the only one I do trust in this matter, because you like me, believe that they should've never been united, I feel I should do something to make you forget you ever spoke of this. I wake up at all times in the night with the fear that they might be stolen, and I have warded it to Avalon and back." He shook his head as if to clear away whatever she was doing to him from his mind. "I am scared. Something is happening that shouldn't, and I can't put a finger on it."

Gienah didn't even feel abashed at the accusation regarding making Harry more transparent to her as he started off with his unusual admission and then became visibly reticent.

"How long has this been going on?"

"Since about a month after that thing with the scientist their side," Harry answered. "Banner, wasn't it?"

"For one whole year Harry?" demanded Gienah incredulously. "You hid it from me for a year, when we had an express agreement to keep me posted regarding precisely such an eventuality?"

"Why do you think I spoke about Frodo and Bilbo? The other day, Teddy accidentally found the cloak. How he broke through my spells I have no idea, but he did. I scared him, Gienah. I was about to hit him, or curse him, I don't know!" he ended in a distraught, anguished yell. "He recovered, but Remus has stopped me from talking to or seeing Teddy before I sorted it out."

And she knew. Harry loved his godson. And Harry hated Vernon Dursley, a muggle who would, in isolation, make people believe Voldemort and the blood supremacists. Something of this sort happening meant that Harry was under the thrall of those accursed things, but him willing to seek help showed that he was fighting.

"What did you do?"

"Put it under a Fidelius."

"Where is it, Harry?"

He looked at her blankly, then in anger. She stunned him and then revived him, before slapping him hard when he started fingering his wand with a clear attacking intent. He blinked at her stupidly, then he realised the rising anger.

"Why do you want to know?"

"To keep you from going there, and to keep me from going there, unless there is absolutely nothing else we can do."

"How do I trust you?" he spat, his anger rising exponentially.

"We will make each other an Unbreakable Vow to not pursue, on my part, and to not use on yours, and to not check on those things more than once a month."

"THOSE THINGS ARE MINE! YOU WANT THEM JUST LIKE FURY DOES! DID YOU TELL HIM? HOW DOES HE KNOW?"

She was alarmed at the way Harry was reacting. This was the same man who successfully threw off Voldemort's Imperius Curse at fourteen. She wondered how she had missed this so long. He was even incoherent, and his reactions had changed like a suddenly flipped switch. There was only one thing to do. She stunned him again. If he was so controlled and yet had been able to avoid detection, she was worried beyond words. Prying open his mouth, she poured two doses of the Calming Draught in, easing them down his throat, before she considered calling in back-up.

It was not every day that Gienah Black, Corvus of the Department of Mysteries, was shocked so. And this was Harry Potter, the person, who, for the past ten years had been moulding and shaping the magical world in a way that most sensible people could agree. How had she missed such violent rages? How had he hidden them from her, especially when she had made it her mission to monitor him? She cursed herself for not involving herself further into matters when that SNAFU started back in 2003. She was reminded of Dumbledore's grudging admission back in 1996, when the kids had broken into her Department, and had put them on her radar, as well as those of some unscrupulous elements among her group whom she had to eliminate earlier than planned. In protecting herself and her secrets from SHIELD, she had left Harry in the lurch, dealing with too many things alone. Harry had the leadership and liaison of the British side thrust upon him as she had agreed with the Prime Minister, but he needed a bit of guidance too. He was still young – too young to have all these things piled upon him.

"Director?" a scared voice sounded, as she mulled over the matter, and cursed her own foolishness. It was, of course, the one woman whom she trusted to be in her and Harry's mutual confidence. "May I go...Harry's here?"

Hermione was flummoxed to say the least. Even though Harry was doing everything he could to avoid her and the matter when she had suggested that they try being more than friends, she still looked out for him. However he was, she knew herself and him enough to be secure in the knowledge that she did love him and had no intention to give up on him. And she cared enough to see that he was not dealing with the pressure well, or was having some problems, though his insistence on keeping her at an arm's length those past two years made it difficult to discern exactly what. But she was persistent if nothing else, and Harry needed a lot of taking care of, something that others couldn't or wouldn't see. So she had assumed the responsibility.

Gienah's eyes flashed at Hermione's words. The new young recruit's sudden emergencies suddenly became a crucial piece of a puzzle that she hadn't known to exist till five minutes ago.

"How long have you known this?"

"Director?" squeaked Hermione in an undignified way.

"You're clever enough to know that I know what your emergencies are, Granger. How long have you known of this? How have you known of this?"

"Two years, ma'am; he started having sudden mood changes, sudden fits of rage, and so on. It's been worse for about a year now. The worst is that he now lies, and he believes what he says, so we don't know what to make of that. I thought he was having some problems. But he wouldn't tell me," she added a bit morosely. "I had to know when his rage was triggered though. I put a blood pressure diagnostic on him," she disclosed.

"What did you learn?"

"I fear he may be depressed. He has nightly terrors, I know. He has sudden fits of rage, and he has become poor company of late."

"Did mind control cross your mind?"

"That's a bit ridiculous," Hermione replied with a scoff she usually reserved for Luna's many animals. "He could throw off Voldemort. What could control **_his_** mind?"

"You did not see fit to get him help?"

"He doesn't so much as look at me on some days," Hermione cried. "What do you expect me to do?"

"Tell me, perhaps?"

"So you could monitor him and do nothing? I have had enough of old, supposedly well-meaning people treating him as a specimen instead of helping him." She had never forgiven Dumbledore for that last order he had given Harry, however much Harry had pointed out over the years that he had known all along, that Dumbledore had told **_him_**.

Gienah felt a twinge of pity for the young woman. Harry was a stupid man. His fears were making him a jackass where Hermione was concerned. She eyed the righteously irritated woman, a woman Gienah had kept tabs on shrewdly. She had wondered about back-up. Handling Harry was a huge part of statecraft. And he needed handling. More than Sirius, more than anyone else in her department, there was only one person who could help handle Harry, now that she thought about it. And Hermione was decidedly easier to handle.

"Are you willing to be reassigned?"

"What? We are working on replicating the Gamma radiation effects with magical controls, you know that! You want me to abandon that?" Hermione was outraged at the thought of this sudden change in her assignment. She was close.

"I want you to work with him in your free time."

That stopped her in her tracks.

"Why?"

It was a good question. And, given what the girl was doing and what she wanted her to do, Gienah knew she would have to give her at least a piece of the truth – and a palatable one. Harry might have been used to being treated as an asset. Hermione was always more concerned with Harry, her friend, a human being who needed to be loved. It was useful for Corvus.

"Hermione," Gienah replied with affected tiredness, "while I have seemed to have an agenda, I truly do intend to look out for my family the best I can. Harry is included in that. He is being controlled. And we need to extract him from a bad situation. You care for him, and you have some idea as to his changes, for you have observed him. I don't say I trust you fully, but you are the best option I have. Think about it. If you choose to work in this matter too, I need to be able to trust you fully."

"What is the matter?"

"Will you hold it to a level of secrecy over and above anything related to the Department secrets?"

She received a shrewd look she was well-acquainted with.

"What is your agenda?"

Gienah wished she could be proud of the girl, truly.

"That is my only agenda, as of now. Besides checking to see how much damage Harry has caused of course."

"What damage has he caused?"

Needing her assent on the matter, Gienah freely put Harry under the Hogwarts Train. "You said he lies. He accused me of telling the SHIELD about the secret that I want to trust you with."

Hermione stared at Gienah mistrustfully. SHIELD, Hermione knew, was working with things like the Tesseract, something she knew from her first conversation with Gienah all those years ago, a conversation that remained seared into her memory. She had also always held a healthy amount of paranoia regarding SHIELD since she knew of them, and she had tried to dissuade Harry from accepting the role with the SNAFU for that very reason. Harry was being controlled by something. And SHIELD had had Harry on the radar ever since he had united the Hallows causing some sort of energy reading that she did not yet have enough data about to understand, even now, ten years later.

"You will have my help if you answer my four questions."

"I am not required to."

"And I am not required to keep up with this charade where you dump so much on Harry that he breaks down completely. I can, and will destroy everything here related to my work if I need to, stun him, and walk off. As I said, I do not trust supposedly well-meaning old people. You memory-charm me, or kill me, or any such thing, and all the original material and my additive work, everything, is gone."

And somehow Gienah didn't doubt the girl. She updated her assessment of Hermione Granger mentally. She wasn't easier to handle. She was just easier to manipulate if it was about Harry and that too conditionally.

"Ask."

"How long have the Hallows controlled Harry? How have they controlled him? How long have you known that? And have you told SHIELD about them?"

Gienah updated her assessment again. The girl was right on the money. If she was blunt, then again it was only because of her greatest weakness. Fortunately, she was only asked questions she could answer truthfully without prevarication, for once.

"I do not know the answer to the first two questions. I intended to find those just when you came. I knew for about five minutes before you came. And I haven't told anyone. As I told you then, I did not like the idea of those things being united, though it is now beyond my control. And as I told you then, I do not hold SHIELD in the highest regard, a position that hasn't changed since."

Hermione glared at the older woman with narrowed eyes.

"Then why allow him to go there – coerce him rather?"

"They wanted him to go to Afghanistan."

And Hermione could see the lesser of two evils in SHIELD. There was the simple matter of escalation which Harry had used to dissuade the muggle governments, as well, but the truth was that Hermione didn't want Harry actively being embroiled in that war. That, however, did not mean that she trusted Gienah. The woman had experimented on Sirius, and justified it. Even now, Hermione could see the woman's brain working furiously fast as it brought up and discarded plan upon plan to use the situation – and her and Harry as well – towards whatever agenda that she had. At least on that account there was nothing to fear – Gienah most assuredly did not want anything like another Voldemort or something like that on the scene. And, after all, she only trusted herself to be the person within the department who'd put Harry's welfare first. It was a bit of a mothering thing, definitely not what she wanted to do, as opposed to her true wishes, feelings and intentions, but well...

"Alright," she conceded, her tone rich with suspicion regarding Gienah's motives. "Assume for a moment that I have agreed. What would I need to do?"

Gienah disregarded the second sentence, knowing full well that it was only for the sake of appearances. The readiness of the answer that she gave the younger woman told Hermione that her suspicions lay vindicated. She would be damned if she let someone else, especially someone like Gienah Black take control of his life.

"In all honesty, the first thing to do is damage limitation. We need to know all that he has spoken, every memory with SHIELD and SNAFU, just to know the people and get to the people who might know the people who controlled any forms of surveillance that must have been there. You don't trust me a bit, and it should give you a measure of the problem we are in when I say that I trust them less than a thousandth of that – never mind the fact that I believe them to be infiltrated by subversive elements just as we were by Death Eaters at one point. Only they are worse."

"And?" demanded Hermione testily, since this was only the point where Harry was treated as a thing, at best a person who was very close to being dispensable with some skills that were nigh on impossible to replicate – but with neither being an insurmountable difficulty.

"And then we get him out of SHIELD, get him back to humanity, help him de-stress and mentally, spiritually and physically fit and capable enough to be useful to the Department again," Gienah honestly replied. "Harry as a person and Harry as a person who can replicate SHIELD here in England are not to be divorced from the other. That is crucial for our survival and relevance to the world – the organisation, that is; and he is the one with experience to pull it off. So you revive Harry. I will deal with SHIELD, if necessary."

Hermione bit her lip. It wasn't what she wanted to here, but it was by far more honest than she could expect.

"Fine," she bit out.

Gienah duly procured Veritaserum, something that was in the contract Harry signed for eventualities such as these when he could be considered to be compromised, as Hermione once more gained more respect by putting up more privacy charms – not that they could be better than that of Gienah Black, but it was the thought that counted. Then she proceeded to securely bind Harry to the chair he was in, before divesting him of every possible thing she knew he could use to get free, having seen him in cold, calculated rages, berserker rages and inventive fighting modes.

"I am reviving him," Gienah cautiously stated. She only received a curt nod in response, before Hermione stopped her.

"Do you have a list of questions?"

"I don't need it," the Chief of the Unspeakables scoffed as she revived her asset. "Potter," she growled as Harry groggily groaned.

"What do you know about the Deathly Hallows?" Corvus asked, pouncing mercilessly upon Harry.

Both women were alarmed when, instead of answering tonelessly, Harry actually **_whimpered_** in fear, murmuring "no" over and over again. Such adverse reactions were very rare but sadly not unheard of.

"Have you given anyone a Vow of some sort? Are you contractually bound to not discuss this?"

"No," he replied still whimpering.

"Then what do you know about the Hallows? What do they do?"

Harry cringed back into the chair as much as his bounds allowed, still nearly crying as if in unbearable pain

The two interrogators shared a worried look. What could make Harry react that way?

Hermione crouched next to him and caressed his head in a vague attempt to pacify him. "Harry," she cautiously prompted, "please. Tell me."

He kept shaking and trying to get away to no avail, before finally sagging in resignation when Gienah saw the ridiculous rate at which Harry had burnt through the dose and had to dose him again. "It's a curse," he answered with a quaver. "It is the greatest curse. Endless, relentless, unstoppable," he attempted to elaborate.

"We will try to free you of it," Hermione promised.

"You cannot," he answered with complete certainty. "I have been cursed. I have seen. It cannot be unseen."

"What did you see, Harry?"

"The final march, the inevitable," he replied unable to speak in anything less than generic terms that gave no great clue.

"Please, Harry," she pled. "Help me understand."

"No," was the partly defiant, partly viciously angry, and fully resolute reply. "I bear it. Not you – never you," he replied before seemingly crumpling upon himself. "I wouldn't do that to Voldemort."

"Potter," Gienah growled, "get a grip. We must know what this is to be able to deal with this. It's an order. What happens?"

"We are mere specks, trading orders," Harry bitterly scoffed.

"We – Must – Know!" Gienah bit out, enunciating each word with force.

"You want to know? Know, then. I have seen the end – the end of everyone. That is what the Hallows do," he spat. "When not even the Resurrection Stone can manage to pull the bearer into the realm of Death, and one becomes the Master, they show the Master the endless march of souls as they die, the march of every dying soul on every planet, on every realm." Hermione gasped and was ignored. "I see what the All-Seeing standing on the Rainbow Bridge cannot. They whisper every spike of pain each soul feels as it leaves the mortal shell, every regret, and every sorrow. Every instant that I bear them together is such pain."

"How does it happen?" whispered Gienah.

"Death cannot be mastered. It is the one truth of the universe. What starts must end. In the moments that one bears the Hallows together, or commands a soul through the stone, hides from certain death, or uses the wand to kill, one becomes Death, embodied. It is beyond human comprehension."

"Are there any other effects?"

"Yes."

"What are those effects?"

"If I look at someone living while holding those things together, I know how they will die. I saw Teddy die."

"Why do you hold it then?"

"The call cannot be broken. Once all three are held together, they seduce and claim the Master."

"What happens if you continue using them?"

"The more you use, the more they ensnare, till the Master will crave for Death, will _love_ Death for the release that dying shall bring. I think they drive the holder mad as well." As horrid as it sounded, the inflection that Harry used was almost that as one used to describe the love for a lover.

"You knew what was happening, and didn't want Teddy to touch those things, didn't you?" Hermione guessed wishing she had never heard Harry describe Death in that tone.

"I love Teddy. I couldn't let that happen to him."

"When did you hold the three together? Why did you do it?"

"There was to be a terror attack in New York. The terrorist committed suicide to prevent us from knowing of his accomplices. I commanded his soul to stop and answer our questions truthfully."

"How did you know that would work?"

"The Hallows told me."

This was getting worse and worse.

"What does SHIELD know?"

"They saw me do it."

"Why did you think I told them?"

"You are the only one apart from me who knew everything about the Hallows thoroughly. I found it suspicious that the terrorist was so convenient because he had escaped their trap somehow and I encountered him barely a week later. His dying just as I caught him and the SHIELD people not trying too hard to _not_ kill him before interrogation made me suspicious."

"Have they asked?"

"They tried. I refuse to answer."

"Have you used the Hallows any other time in their presence?"

"Many fights in places across the world," Harry answered.

"Why?"

"Muggle technology kills many and fast. I had to stop them from killing our soldiers or anyone on the team."

"Was it always necessary?"

"I do not know."

Gienah became grim as she considered this. One look at Hermione told her that the clever young girl was thinking the same. Why – when the war was concentrated in Central Asia and the Eastern regions of the Middle East – were there fights around the world, where SHIELD and SNAFU needed to intervene?

She made a decision. There were times when Harry was an asset. There were times when he was one of her people. There were times when he was both. This was such a time. She had to extricate him from SHIELD, immediately. She wouldn't allow the idiots to destroy Harry. She nodded at Hermione to signal that she had asked the questions she needed to as she increased the dosage to ensure that Harry answered the next questions. She was alarmed to see that the potion had to be administered thrice during the questioning already, and that it was losing its efficacy faster.

Hermione glowered at her.

"Where is it, Harry?"

"At the Halloween Home," he replied through gritted teeth, as the Veritaserum forced him to answer the question.

"You managed to be the Secret-Keeper too?" she asked, a bit astounded, as the mention of Halloween Home reminded her of the Potter Home where Voldemort had first been banished back in 1981.

"Yes."

"When did you do it?"

"Last week," he replied.

"Did you become free of the Hallows or manage to forget them?"

"No. I feel the urge to check on them all the time."

That was enough information to get on with. Gienah unceremoniously stunned him again as she sunk into her chair. This was beyond just serious, or troubling. She wanted to rant and rave and everything else. That failure with the Hallows was coming back to haunt them and would, it seemed, till Harry died. Then a more troubling thought made her wake him again.

"Have you had any brushes with Death?"

"Yes. Riddle killed me before I killed him. You know that already."

"Did you have the Hallows with you, at the time?"

"Yes."

Gienah's heart sank right past her feet.

"And after that?" she fearfully asked.

"Horribly bad injuries, but nothing worse than anything Madam Pomfrey could heal."

Hermione and her boss shared a worried glance, considering his knack for health related understatements. Of all the things in the world, there was only one thing that had the capability of turning Harry into something like Riddle – immortality. Unlike Riddle who craved immortality, however, Harry would consider it a curse, rightly, and that would break him. He had never been good at seeing those he considered "his people" die. Outliving everyone would be the worst punishment that any mind could think up for Harry to bear.

"Give him the antidote," Gienah directed tiredly.

Twenty minutes, three vomiting spells and four trips to the bathroom later, a severely dehydrated Harry was glowering at his interrogators balefully, stung by what he considered as betrayal.

The old Head of Department dismissed the glower negligently. She scrutinised the young man as he was plied with electrolyte solutions and some fruit juice to overcome the effects of the Veritaserum overdose, and a calming draught to get him to listen. That was another headache. Potter had burned through the truth potion as if he was rapidly building resistance to it. She then reached into her drawer, rifled through a few files, before retrieving Harry's contract and placing it on the table between them. Harry's recognition of the document, and his understanding and grim acceptance of the interrogation, at least, was proof of his retained mental faculties, for the time being. He settled for glaring at Hermione.

"Leave off there, Potter. She was here because your blood pressure spiked."

Harry looked away, abashed.

"I am taking you off active field duty," she informed him shortly. "I want you under surveillance, but that would get more people interested," she curtly continued, overriding his attempts at any protest. "It is time for me to deal with this matter." She then sighed tiredly and looked at him with undisguised pity. "Harry, this is not permanent. But you must recognise that you're compromised. You are an asset, yes, and you're one of mine. They are probing your strengths, testing your limits. And they are doing this without your, Shacklebolt's, or my permission. Do you see where I am going with this?"

"They are contravening all protocol, and they are supposedly sticklers for those," he answered with a nod.

"Yes, 'supposedly' is the operative word, but that does not allay my actual fears. I have long feared that they have been infiltrated by parallel, powerful and criminal institutions. We have no idea regarding who exactly is ordering these tests, though I will at the very least, lodge a very stern protest against this."

"And what do I do? Go back into the Ministry?" Harry scoffed.

"No. You take a sabbatical."

"WHAT?"

"Sit. Down," Gienah coldly commanded. "You heard what I said. You take a sabbatical for a year, maybe more. They are bound to follow you. We will be trapping them to find out who they really are."

"Oh," muttered Harry, fairly mollified.

"At the same time, I believe that it is time for you to take up your studies again. And I mean your muggle studies. Travel a bit. Basically stay away from work for a bit. You are twenty-six, Harry. You are sagged by worries and it is visible." She stood and paced around the room, before turning to him with a wicked grin. "Recharge yourself a bit. For when you return, we are going to give better than we got, and the targets will, if things go as I plan, be on your tail, ripe for our picking." She grinned a bit maniacally before muttering, "They have SHIELD, and they tried to illegally use you? We might just have to show them how we work, then."

This was the right thing to say, certainly, as it brought a reluctant grin to Harry's face.

"Go visit your friends, talk to Dumbledore; do whatever you feel like for a bit. Just stay away."

"And split those things up," Hermione interrupted Gienah's runaway plans. "Or make someone else the secret-keeper. Break free."

"She is right. Choose three different people and hide those things away, till we need them, for we will."

Harry wasn't convinced. "I don't trust the Fidelius."

"I don't either," Gienah agreed tiredly. "But of all the people in the world to be cursed with it, it is you who has the Stone. You may have descended from Ignotus, Potter, but you bear the curse of Cadmus. If for that reason alone, we must take that Stone from your hands, and place it in those who cannot be tempted. You can keep the cloak. Even the wand, if you must; but you cannot keep the Stone."

"I understand," Harry agreed grudgingly. He knew there was no way to refute her logic where they traversed in matters that defied sense, let alone logic. "There is however one problem. I fear that what is tied cannot be untied. What is done cannot be undone. Separation is an illusion."

"It may so be. But it is an illusion that can prevent your mind from being further harmed. At this point I will take what I can get."

* * *

"You have taken him to watch a film," Remus said slowly, as if believing that the statement would make more sense that way.

"Yes," replied Hermione. For five hours, she had forced a newly cut loose Harry to do exactly what Gienah had ordered him to do – unwind. A film (some absurd chick flick, booked specifically because she knew Harry would not get his hands on a time-turner, and because he would spend the whole of it grumbling, calling all the characters idiots, and then possibly accusing Hermione of trying to set up a new Madame Puddifoot's type of place which would mostly be fun because she hated the films just as much) followed by a visit to Lake District, aided in no small degree by the minimal transport time was the order of the day.

Simultaneously, she was also using her Time Turner – a security device that was always on hand considering the nature of her work with the Unspeakables – for the first time since being sanctioned one for use, to call a meeting of some of Harry's closest friends to perform a kind of intervention for him. Naturally, it had turned into a meeting for the four members of the Order who had fought both wars against Voldemort – Sirius, Remus, Kingsley and Minerva. The secrecy of the matter dictated that Hagrid not be included.

"Harry is in a bad way, Remus. I have secured permission from Gienah to tell you this – only you four. He has been under a curse for what, it seems, might have been the entire time since Voldemort was killed." Without waiting for them to react in any manner, she continued, "You remember, Sirius, what Gienah had said about the Hallows?"

"That she didn't want them united?"

"Yes. It seems that there is a part of the Story that nobody knew, because there has been no documented Master of Death."

"Is Harry...?"

"Yes he is."

There were sharp exhalations around the room as they processed the information, before Remus asked, "Was the curse why Harry...you know...scared Teddy?"

"Yes and no," Hermione answered. "The curse didn't make Harry shout at Teddy. The effect of the Curse scared Harry enough on Teddy's behalf to shout at him."

"Enough riddles," Sirius growled. "What's going on?"

"Harry's been under the Hallows' control," Hermione replied without any degree of prevarication.

"Bullshit!" Sirius shot back. When she did not make any change to her statement, he sank a bit as he realised the truth.

"There's a last trick Death played. Death could never accept a Master, a true one that is. The Hallows show the Master the death throes of every living being while he bears them, if unfocussed on an individual. And, though Harry wasn't as elaborate, when focussed on an individual, it shows how the person dies." She looked at Remus in pity and sympathy. "One such individual was Teddy."

"No!" Remus moaned weakly.

"And this is my conjecture, but I believe that Teddy was in the possession of the cloak in that vision."

"How do we avoid it?" Minerva asked.

"I am sure that was what Harry was trying to do when he shouted at Teddy. Imagine a person like him, seeing someone he loves die, yet again – only this time as a vision, yet unable to verify. What would he do?" Hermione shook her head as she contemplated her bottle of butterbeer. "He used a peculiar word for what happens to the Master of Death – "crave". The Master craves Death, wishes for sweet release, as Death eventually masters the Master." She felt her skin crawling as she remembered that tone. "The word he didn't use, and one that both Gienah and I heard, was "Love". Almost intimate, from the very bottom of his soul, even carnal, that's what it sounded like."

"How long has my second in command been compromised? I heard what you said about the Hallows controlling him since 1998, but I ask to the degree we see or fear now."

"The past year or two," Hermione answered. "Understand that there is no known precedent."

"Forgive my impertinence," an old voice interrupted, "but you keep saying "documented", "known precedent". Do you mean to say there might have been another Master of Death?"

Hermione levelled a look of deepest loathing at the portrait of Albus Dumbledore, perched beside that of Harry's grandparents and of his parents – the only instances when the Hallows had done Harry no harm as far as Hermione knew. "Very direct and demanding of information now, aren't you?"

Dumbledore sighed. "However much you may not so believe, Miss Granger, I do care for Harry, very deeply so. The subject of you according me forgiveness may remain unresolved between us, but understand this. Everything I have ever done – however much I may have loathed myself for those actions – has been necessary. Your anger on Harry's behalf does indeed only compare to my own, and so I ask for no forgiveness from you. Indeed, as a portrait, such things mean very little to me, living impaired as I am."

"It's not just him dying that night, Dumbledore," Hermione snarled. "You were responsible for making him the Master of Death! And while I may even get over that night, I will never forgive the fact that you set the worst curse upon him!"

They had never seen a portrait become pale, before Dumbledore mumbled, " _Terrible things happen_ , indeed." It seemed as if he was quoting it.

"What do you mean, Albus?" Kingsley asked.

"I cannot say."

"Dumbledore, please," Remus begged.

"Remus, I am saying exactly what I mean. I am but a portrait, with memories bespelled by my living self. I **_cannot_** say!"

"Why?" asked Minerva. "Can I not command you?"

"I do not see what good it would do. If your command does allow me to say, I would, of course present all that I know at your disposal. You did, in a fit of rage, order me to divulge my secrets not long after the war was won. And yet, I distinctly remember that I could not speak about this."

"Albus, tell me what you meant to hide about Harry and the Master of Death."

The portrait blinked at her in utter confusion, a look nobody had ever seen Albus Dumbledore wear. "I am sorry. I cannot speak." He then spoke directly to Hermione, "I may not have spoken what I cannot. I cannot divulge any more than I already have." With that he walked out of the portrait.

"Fuck!" swore Hermione viciously.

"Really now, Miss Granger," Minerva reprimanded.

"You haven't seen what it does to Harry. It's not just the blood pressure troubles as his anger spikes, his rages, incoherence, the sudden whimpering, and all the times I have found him crying! He has done something to harm him again!"

"It all comes back down to that Prophecy," Kingsley said, his tone very worried. "Have there been any changes?"

"Just the one that we told you about – Harry's name still is on it but Riddle's isn't."

"I don't understand this. What's the worst that can happen now than another immortal Dark Lord?" wondered Sirius.

"You idiot, Padfoot," Remus remarked exasperatedly. "Now you've gone and done it. I wonder how you ever became Harry's godfather with such absent brains."

"What the hell do you mean Moony?"

"Harry's bad luck is on steroids which have been on steroids themselves. And you just had to wonder what worse could happen? It bloody well will happen now. As if I didn't have enough to worry about with Teddy," he said as he sank his head into his hands.

"You're taking this pretty calmly Moons."

"What should I do? Go into hysterics? I exhausted those when Tonks died. I have fought a lot. It seems that may not have been enough. I will fight for Teddy of course, and I know Harry will too, when it comes to that. And as I promised James and Lily, I will do the same for Harry too. What else can we do, but deal with what we have to? A few moments of weakness is all that I can have, we can't afford anymore."

"Well said, Remus," Kingsley said. "If we must, we will fight, for..."

"Something wicked this way comes," Hermione sang out to the tune of the Hogwarts' choir's rendition of Shakespeare's words from Macbeth with a hysteric giggle.

* * *

The ensuing days were spent making arrangements for the next course of action for Harry. It was a troubling time, because Harry needed all his friends with him, and yet, the matter was shrouded in secrecy by necessity. For over a month thereafter, Gienah and Kingsley spent time making a list of those that had to be brought into the secret and with their permission, performing psyche evaluations, the results of which were being compiled.

Dr. Justin Finch-Fletchley, one of the psychiatrists attached to the DMLE, and an old member of the Dumbledore's Army, was reassigned to shared duties with the Department of Mysteries, with his Mind-Healing training fast-tracked. Luna Lovegood, as always an enigma, but one who was whetted and chosen as trustworthy was another. There was of course Hermione to join them, with Sirius, Kingsley, Remus and Minerva in the know.

Kingsley, on the other hand was calling in a few favours owed to him around the globe to clear a set of itineraries that Luna suggested they pursue to help her search the Snorkacks. Kingsley did not ask further, choosing only to mark it down as a wildlife exploration mission with Sirius joining the two. A little globetrotting without the worries that fighting terror would bring would certainly help a person wind down.

* * *

 **January 2007**

"I just wish Ron was here," Hermione had sadly remarked. "He would have helped a lot. I would have felt better were he with you on this trip; less worried at any rate." At his gobsmacked expression, she amended, "You'd both get to all kinds of shenanigans, but at l still would have felt less worried."

"I spoke with him. Dumb bastard still won't agree he should have taken the supposedly wandless idiot first. He's having the time of his...uh...death playing chess with Dumbledore and some guy named Wilhelm Steinitz. He says Dumbledore taught him German to help him understand Steinitz better," Harry reported.

"Ron is playing Chess with Steinitz?" Hermione asked in a strangled voice.

"Yeah, you know him?"

"He was only the first ever undisputed world chess champion."

"Figures you'd know," Harry grunted. "I had to Google him."

Shaking her head at the very absurdity of it all, Hermione couldn't help it as she asked, "Anything else?"

"Yeah, his Chudley Cannons robes aren't the only things his hair clashes with anymore. Git managed to find a place where the whole damn ambience is orange."

Deciding to drop the subject for the sake of her sanity, Hermione went back to eating and reached out to take a sip of orange juice before thinking better of it and pushing it away. Maybe it was good she wasn't on that trip at all.

* * *

 **19th February, 2007**

"Why, Luna, when we could be in Brazil during the Carnival, are we willingly trudging through the Rainforests of Amazon being willingly bitten by all kinds of these damn insects?" Sirius demanded.

She glanced around serenely. "Daddy said that the best of his trips started with the Amazons, and he always managed to find something even if it wasn't something he was really looking for, here."

A few minutes later, there was the unmistakable sound of jeeps cutting their way through the jungle, followed by the unmistakable sounds of people, including children shouting in terror.

Harry grimaced, his "saving people thing", as Hermione called it, demanding that he go and check, at the very least. "Well, I doubt peace is one of those."

The next moment, all noise around them ceased, like the engulfing silence of the calm before the storm, a silence that was broken by a most unearthly roar.

Gryffindors that Sirius and Harry were, they ran towards the noise, and the people, instead of away.

Trailing serenely in their wake, Luna commented to nobody in particular, "It seems you have found something here, as well, Harry, even if you weren't looking for it."

* * *

Did you see that coming?

By now, I am sure anyone reading this has seen all the Marvel films up to and including Infinity War. Obviously, please assume that I possess the virtual version of the Reality Stone and I am twisting things up to bring the two universes together. Also, the Soul Stone is, well, not on Vormir. This is the timeline reference: collider dot com / mcu-timeline-explained. The Marvel TV shows haven't – so far as we know – actually affected the Infinity War scene, which is where this story will culminate.

Oh, yeah, I won't be writing any Captain Marvel into this story. I want Thanos to be beaten by the Avengers we've known till now, so I am even going to pretend that that film won't exist.


	5. Bloodying Noses

**Bloodying Noses**

Thanks to the lone reviewer, ArtimuousJackson for the review.

The Widow, for this story, was born neatly between the MCU-Widow (1984) and comics Widow (1928). There is a Flashback, which, even though it breaks the flow somewhat, is actually necessary, because there won't be any more allusion to the changes to HP canon due to an HP-Marvel combined interference. It ties into the last Chapter, which also I have written.

And I haven't seen this much, but just like the parallels between Remus and Banner, aren't the natures of Sirius and Tony Stark similar?

* * *

 **January 2007**

While Harry, Luna and Sirius were getting ready for a world-trip, in the bowels of the Ministry of magic, the Unspeakables were getting ready for protecting their asset and information.

"Croaker, Demiguise, Bowtruckle, report," barked Corvus over the intercom. "Granger, you come over too!"

The four obedient minions presented themselves with not a little trepidation. The boss was crankier than usual. This usually meant short stilted conversations – even more so than were the norm for the department.

"One of our field assets was abused by another organisation. We are required to exact a measure of retribution," Corvus stated.

"We normally do not interfere unless an opportunity presents itself," Croaker objected.

"We do and must when they break an agreement. And considering the agent and the nature of the information stolen, we must retrieve it and lodge a protest that will endure in their memories."

"Director?" the woman named Bowtruckle prompted.

"The damn Americans managed to compromise Potter regarding **_the_** artefacts."

There were no visible reactions at that, but there were no more objections regarding the need for such action either. Hermione's involvement raised eyebrows.

Corvus pre-empted any questions with a circumspect defence. "She is Potter's friend and an acceptable handler – a new one. She's the one who realised something was amiss, but didn't know enough to think of the ramifications. As a friend of his, she will do for now." Turning to Hermione she demanded, "What's his status?"

"It has been relaxed since the Separation. I have been in contact with Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Luna Lovegood. They have catalogued every sudden behavioural change. The instances have reduced drastically, and are now significantly benign. He seems upbeat about the impending travel."

Corvus only nodded with a grunt.

"What course of action do we pursue?" Croaker asked.

Corvus presented them with a dossier. It contained the details of the entire S.N.A.F.U. team. "I want them located, tagged and selectively or fully obliviated regarding Potter, after we get information regarding the people they gave the information about Potter to. We cut through SHIELD's ranks."

"Outwards in?" asked Bowtruckle.

"No. Inwards out and top-down," replied Gienah. "I am very sure that SHIELD has been corrupted to the very top. We should know who, if we ever need to act. Let them pick up the pieces."

"The MACUSA will not be happy about it."

"Their opinion means what exactly when it means that an action that can be reasonably considered as betrayal was committed?" Gienah asked, a bit rhetorically. "All the same, they have been notified regarding operations under the shared jurisdiction. All embassies throughout the world have been notified regarding tactical action teams up to seven people needing the use of any available channels for covert operations."

"Are the muggle governments in the know?"

"Plausible deniability," Corvus replied.

"What extent of force should we use?"

"I don't want them knowing that we have taken such actions. Manufacture accidents if it comes to that, but try and use polyjuiced decoys during any interrogation, or similar alternatives."

The three Unspeakables nodded. They had once participated in the field also.

"Granger will be coordinating with you regarding Potter's movements in case they twig onto this."

"On one condition," Hermione interrupted. "I want a guarantee from all of you regarding your loyalties. I don't know you, and any or all of you, or even I could be reporting to other...interested elements."

"It is a requirement for every new assignment, stretching only around the given assignment, kid," the one known as Demiguise flippantly brushed her off.

"I insist on being here for it and reviewing the wording."

"You think you can do better than us?"

"I don't know about better, but you look like you have had several years trusting each other. That's what got us into the mess. Dumbledore trusted what looked like Moody but wasn't."

"Hmm... once bitten twice shy, is it? On the condition that you take similar precautions," Demiguise bargained.

"I accept."

"Haggle more next time," Gienah admonished with a grimace.

Hermione didn't bother to reply.

"If, however, you find someone who is not loyal to SHIELD or any tentatively allied organisation, arrange an accident for all those involved if the information is not too widespread. If it is widespread, set up monitors on the highest level agent and randomly eliminate those on the middle and lower levels. Put the infiltrators in disarray. Things are bad enough since Potter kept it quiet for a year, but we can go in for damage limitation, and pruning the wilder branches."

"What do we do with the evidence of infiltration?" asked Croaker.

"Document it and conceal it. If they are foolish enough to allow enough infiltration to the level that a tactical secret of this kind was leaked, then SHIELD doesn't deserve to exist. It is not our responsibility to clean their messy homes except eliminating the mess and holding it over them if the mess extends on our side. And we can never have enough bargaining chips. And a random cull will put them in quite the disarray given that they won't know our act of the Good Samaritan."

"Perhaps," Demiguise suggested, "we can procure a triple agent, willing or otherwise, to report on both organisations to us? It's not as if the muggles were able to hide the mind programming modules that the KGB ran from us."

"Romanov!" Hermione exclaimed as she remembered where she had heard the term most recently regarding someone specific.

"Red hair, wilful, acrobatic, ex-KGB, now SHIELD," recounted Croaker. "She's been around for quite some time. She's an enhanced, so far as I know. I have often believed her to be part of the Red Room programme. She could well be in her mid-forties or fifties."

"What? She couldn't be older than me!"

"Oh, SHIELD has a predilection for agents with quite the colourful history and tremendous psychological malleability. Dr. Erskine, if I remember right, developed the Super Soldier Serum. It was _the_ technology, muggle, magical and everything else considered. The veritable fountain of youth, it could be called, if you'd care for the description. There were many human experiments as everyone tried to recreate it."

"That's inhuman."

"That was the Cold War. A pissing contest if it ever was, but people were desperately squeezing their bladders dry out fear. We had stayed out of it, but we did a bit of experimentation too. But we had focussed on spell and curse resistance."

"That's what you did to Sirius," Hermione accused.

"You should've seen Black in Azkaban. He was leeched of life. A course of our Serum's first version had him recovering. It was not a massive success, but it has been enough to help him out till he recovered his body and mind. You might have observed that he is significantly stronger than any wizard has a right to be," Croaker pointed out, a bit boastfully. "I would go so far as to say that he is almost magically strong, since I know for a fact that he ditched his wand during the war to clobber a giant after bashing its ankle." At the astonished looks on most faces, Croaker chuckled, "What, you didn't know? The bugger was about to step on Dumbledore. He took out the giant's nose and eyes once he crashed. Black is now much more than a wizard. Nobody else could have survived losing half the body to the Veil, with a withering curse to boot, or held on to the Veil's frame for dear life till Potter and Lupin pulled him back. Of course, he can't turn into a dog now, what with having half a metal body, but that's an okay thing to lose if the option is dying."

"What did you base it on? Phoenix tears and Re'em blood?" Hermione guessed wildly.

"Seems the obvious answer, doesn't it?" Croaker mused, not directly answering whether it was true or not. "Had we succeeded, though, he would have been somewhere on the scale between Romanov and the American Mascot, Captain America."

"She was given the Serum?"

"Unlikely; the only known case was that captain, Roderick or something. She never showed anything remotely similar to what the Serum was reported to do, yet her agility seems superhuman."

"You know quite a bit," Bowtruckle remarked with undisguised interest.

"I was with the muggle agency before and worked as a grunt for Sashtakov briefly. He was her second husband. She helped kill him."

"Do you think she might be among those likely to misuse the information about Harry?"

"Definitely; she will put it to every imaginable use. But not for any organisation that would oppose SHIELD. It's an even bigger protection for her than Dumbledore was for Snape. The poor man was way too benign even as a terrorist compared to some of the things she is rumoured to have done."

"Can she hurt Harry with it?"

"Yes. That is why Potter might have allowed himself to be used. Blackmail is an art form where a Black Widow is concerned, something I am fairly certain she is. We can't rule out that he might have portrayed vulnerability initially to find out what she was up to."

" _A_ Black Widow?" asked Demiguise, stressing on the article.

"A product of the Red Room. It was rumoured that they had a small company of those," Croaker replied. "Between those two countries and their one-upmanship, they have thought up such horrors as should have their makers executed, though they will deny those things even exist. Not that we can say much, anyway, but well, magicals have largely stayed out of it."

"What's all this politics got to do with the Unspeakables, anyway?"

"We heard you were clever. We never heard about your naivety," Gienah derided. "Invention, research and everything else is born out of necessity. Politics creates wars. Wars create necessity. Why do you think Croaker, a man with three Masteries was, sent out to be Sashtakov's henchman? Know the necessities of the enemy and the ally and build contingencies for both. With one it is a counter, with the other an ace when it comes to getting what we want. There's a reason most Unspeakables are well-rounded. By keeping an eye out on things, sabotaging really horrible things, and things which take the escalation to another level altogether, by stealing secrets where necessary, building up on them, that's how the arm of the Department that works with security installations works. It's not new. Most new technologies, that later find benign uses, are developed for military use. "

"So will I be sent into the field too?"

"You're not an Unspeakable. And you're too recognisable anyway. No real skills except for fancy wandwork and research either. Even the research is geared to the magical side, since I doubt you had time to keep up with the GCSE. So we would have to send you out as a secretary. That's not something we _want_ to inflict on anyone; they often seem to need different...skills. You're too well-known for that too."

The innuendo was not lost on her.

"That's a rather sexist stereotype."

"It's a job stereotype. They are rare, but male...secretaries exist too."

"If you're done scaring the new girl, Croaker, perhaps we could return to our present matter? We have a fairly important operation to plan," Bowtruckle snidely reproached.

"I am not scared."

This time, Bowtruckle turned her cowl-covered head towards Hermione and patronisingly said, "You should be."

"Well, moving on, since our planning meeting has failed as we trailed down a rabbit trail, let's sum up the plan of action."

It wasn't much, and they had to plan much in depth thereafter, but the objectives were clear.

"Will these actions affect Harry, Sirius and Luna in any manner if someone suspects?"

"They will have agents on their tail, for sure. Harry is a trained to evade and recognise suspicious movements. If he doesn't know that, then he is not worth his laurels. And he is."

"Still, I think Granger is right. We should try and spare some of our own to aid him if he needs help," was Croaker's opinion.

"No. For one, he will find a way out. For another, if we send some of ours to tail him, the others tailing him will wonder whether he has gone rogue on us. He is also now a very skilled Legillimancer, on par, I should think, with Dumbledore in his prime, only with less compunction. He most likely failed because of **_that_** influence on him. He is reasonably fluent with the translation charm, and touristy behaviour to deal with the locals. Sirius and Lovegood are also no slouches."

"Fair enough," Croaker conceded.

* * *

Planning actually takes time. Especially when murder not-really-most-foul is on the cards, but your skills to that end are known to a possible target. To that end, Natasha Romanov remained blissfully unaware, a terrible indictment of her being unprepared for the kind of warfare that Harry brought to the table and of her lack of cognisance regarding the support structure he might have accrued over time, of her SNAFU team being in danger. She could have detected any tail, including a magical one. So she simply wasn't tailed at all. If need be, the process of elimination could be very...literal.

Then again, an element of improvisation always has to be incorporated.

* * *

It was barely two weeks later that Grant Ward deeply suspected that something was afoot. It had been for some time now. Ever since Potter had been pulled back in by the Brits from his SNAFU team, there were some things going on that left him paranoid. Things were moving on their side and any and all information about him had trickled off.

Coulson was, in spite of Ward gaining his trust to the extent that anyone in a spy organisation could, entirely silent about matters. Then again it was not surprising. Phil Coulson, for all that he portrayed a general demeanour of an unused bar of soap and seemed just as inspiring, was a perfect foil for and therefore the right-hand man of Fury for a reason. He was just as conniving, clever, and unfortunately, loyal to SHIELD, as the Director was. It had taken quite some effort to successfully hoodwink Coulson and become a confidante.

He had to take stock now. The extent to which SHIELD had their operatives, and which operatives were in contact about the Potter situation, as well as their contacts in the MACUSA who were working to find a way to insulate no-majs as they called them, from magic, since not many among them had clearance through SHIELD. Normally, Ward would have never done something so stupid – never write, never commit any evidence to a hard copy. It was something that was ingrained in the psyche of every agent across agencies. But here he was, the Agent of SHIELD believed to be among Phil Coulson's trusted men, making a list of everyone who knew about Potter and their affiliations as far as he knew them to be, even adding a small 'D' if he believed them to be disposable assets.

His self-appointed task done, Ward paced in his little flat, finishing the rest of his half-smoked cigarette before turning in on that rare night when he wasn't on duty at all.

"Thank you, Mr. Ward," muttered a shadowy figure in the corner that had evaded notice quite easily. This was Bowtruckle, who had tailed the man for a week and had struck the metaphorical jackpot on what was supposed to only be a reconnaissance mission. That MACUSA had traitors was not so surprising, but these needed to be taken care of. For the time being, however, the main effort had been in evading detection by the magical government of the USA – her presence as well as the Confundus, the Imperius Curse and the Killing Curse by an unregistered magical. While it lent itself to quite the irony and a pun, laying a Fidelius Charm and a few very, very benign wards on the house while Ward was inside had done the trick. It was rather nifty that the charm hid the very fact that it was even cast.

A small injection of a potion that induced a sudden cardiac arrest by speeding up the heartbeat, a little essence of dittany to erase the signs of the injection and a flash of green spellfire (to make sure that the job was done) later, Grant Ward would only be mourned as another young man taken by heart disease brought forth by the rigours of a demanding job – or two.

* * *

"Are you sure you haven't got some sort of probability manipulating magic?" Demiguise asked incredulously as they met again that week. "How can you strike gold with your first attempt itself?"

"You think it might be absurd, but what you say may even be possible, so keep your incredulity and yourself in control," Corvus scolded. "Weird world, you know. So, what do we have here?"

Her shocked, wide eyes were hidden.

"A whole phalanx of agents, **_the_** section head with threat monitoring and assessment and a senator; what's Fury doing, inviting them in?" she snarled sulphurously. "And these are twice as many people who know about Potter and have MACUSA clearances. How the hell is SHIELD even functioning?"

She was dithering a bit about monitoring. Eschewing that option in favour of an all-out attack on SHIELD, the naive-most, stupidest, pipe-dream action flashed across the woman's head, and that was scary enough. Decisions needed to be taken regarding these people. Whatever the organisation that had infiltrated SHIELD was, and Ward had been exceedingly careful to never mention or murmur about it even under the Imperius, it could gobble SHIELD whole for all she cared at this point. Her asset was more important than a failure of a security organisation, irrespective of their Nations' alliances – especially this one.

But the interference by MACUSA, or at least, the traitors in MACUSA, stayed her hand. There was no way to hide Potter due to that. **_The_** artefacts couldn't be hidden, now that MACUSA had interfered. Potter needed to be protected from them, but the way things stood, there was no way to do it. _Unless, of course_ , she thought, _Potter was no more in the picture_. That had possibilities. And then, if it was public enough, the vultures would descend on the illusion of his carcass for the Hallows, long enough to expose them. This needed far more thought, planning, and it might even not go through, but it was an option nonetheless.

* * *

 **19th February, 2007**

What were the chances? Here he was, on a holiday with his godfather and one of his best friends, and the Potter-luck struck again. He could have been enjoying the damn Carnival, and where was he? Traipsing through the Merlin-twice-damned Amazon with its bloody blood-sucking insects and a bunch of idiots from SHIELD on his tail.

At least the SHIELD gits were gone now. They had been shaken off when Luna had enacted what Sirius had suggested – that they act out a horrid drunken binge followed by a loud and public threesome a little way from the local pub of the last town they had visited – something that Luna had run away with in sheer amusement and Harry had almost taken ill at the horrible images. Well, she had cast an illusion. He couldn't look either of them in the eye, especially when Sirius and Luna did drink much more than they could hold, and Sirius could hold a lot of liquor. Thankfully they passed out and there were no further incidents or accidents. Harry had found his new Boggart in that illusion. He also was reminded, quite forcibly, why Sirius' suggestions were never, **_ever_** to be considered. He also couldn't wait for the trip to end – so that he could get as far away as was possible from the pair of them.

The very memory made Harry shudder every time as bile rose up his throat each time. Most Blacks were probably perverts. Most Lovegoods were definitely insane. Here, in the deep jungle, where there was some really big, bad troll on the loose, he could not afford to shudder, especially when what seemed to be a group of muggle tourists had run into it.

The situation turned out to be wildly different.

For one, they ended up in a clearing that hosted a small camp.

For another, the people in the jeeps were totting guns and were aiming them at the troll and the unarmed people in the camps, which included children. The troll had certainly gone berserk as it tossed the vehicles – weapons, men and all – as if they were nothing more than the fluffiest of pillows.

For yet another, the troll was wearing _trousers_. At least they once were trousers.

That the troll was attempting to protect the people, that it was getting angrier and stronger the more it was shot and that it had the modicum of intelligence to differentiate between the people behind it and the ones attacking it told Harry all that he needed to know.

"That's not a troll, is it?" Sirius asked fearfully.

"No," replied Harry as he shepherded Luna and Sirius away from the ongoing carnage so that that they wouldn't draw unwarranted attention. "If I am right, and I am sure I am, that is a renowned scientist, Dr. Bruce Banner."

"That thing is a doctor?" Sirius squeaked – in as manly a manner as he could muster.

"The man that turns into that thing is a scientist. Not a healer kind of doctor – so far as I know." Judging their position adequately protected, he ordered, "Now shut up and fire stunners at the gun-wielding troops on my signal."

"That seems rather counterintuitive," Luna pointed out. "I feel safer with the gunmen around."

"If what I've heard is true, that thing can withstand aircraft guns. This will be like letting it get stung by a swarm of mosquitoes – merely annoying. And the more it gets angry, the stronger it gets, so we have to calm it somehow. On my mark," he warned, "STUN!"

Grudgingly both Luna and Sirius fired stunners at the gunmen, dropping them. The sudden assault caught them by surprise, and the fight was over faster than anyone could believe.

Only, it seemed as if Harry had miscalculated.

Like a gigantic ape-bear hybrid, the...thing grunted and roared as its opponents were taken down. It sniffed at them and roared again, and then turned towards the people behind it, before letting out another deafening roar.

"Any other plans, Harry?" Luna testily demanded. It was a true measure of how angry, or scared, or both Luna was, considering that she rarely relinquished her infuriatingly serene equanimity. Unless there were suggestions like the one Sirius had made. She was also a deviant, but that's quite beside the point.

Harry only gulped audibly as the thing advanced upon the scared people. "Yeah, tell everyone at home I love them." Before either Sirius or Luna could react, Harry stepped into the clearing, emulating his best mate's actions from over sixteen years ago, as he banished a rock at the things back and shouted, "Oi pea-brain!"

With an almighty grunt, the creature turned around. On the plus side, it was now no longer intent on attacking the people. On the minus side, it was coming straight for him. Just as the Banner-thing closed upon him, Harry disapparated, and appeared directly behind it.

This action tremendously infuriated the Big Green. It wasn't a sound strategy by any means since it only served to make the thing angrier, but then Harry was able to improvise against opponents that were at least nominally human, were likely to fight to kill, and weren't given to going berserk in rage, or humanoid and fairly stupid. As it was, he was only fleeing the creature.

Sirius was torn between aiding his godson and shepherding the people away. But with how Harry was being stupid and getting the thing angry, giving it someone else to be angry at seemed even more stupid.

Luna's words helped him reach a decision as she weighed in, "We will take these people away with a portkey and stun them and obliviate them later. Or we will stun them first. Harry's apparition is blowing the statute to smithereens anyway."

It took barely five minutes to accomplish that, before Sirius bellowed, "Get the bloody effing hell out of there Harry!"

Harry duly complied – but not before a spark of inspiration made him seize the opportunity. Multiple tracking and monitoring charms hit the befuddled thing as Harry beat a hasty retreat. Strong wizard he might be, but on brute strength, he had just been hilariously outstripped in a way that not even magic could compensate.

* * *

"What the bloody hell?" Sirius blurted out, still in shock after polishing off quite some alcohol to take the edge off the afternoon's events. They had portkeyed the group of people some ten kilometres away. And had ended up almost too close to, what Google named the scientist's alter-ego as, the Hulk's path. And that was a mighty close shave considering the Hulk, and the Abomination, which was another human-turned-beast, had between them managed to destroy an entire neighbourhood in New York.

And if that wasn't enough, Harry had popped off to Merlin-knew-where barely two hours later. If Sirius knew James (whom he knew too well), and knew Lily (whom also he knew), and also knew Harry (which was also true), his little idiot of a godson had gone hunting for the man, Banner. Sense was suspiciously missing sometimes, where Harry's sudden inspirations were concerned. And this, coming from Sirius Black, who had actually brought down a giant with his bare hands (a feat that he still wasn't sure how he had accomplished or whether he had accomplished it in the first place; the memories were hazy ), said a lot.

"Really Sirius," Luna admonished, as she bit into the weird meat thing they were serving locally in the nearest magical town, "I would have thought after helping Remus, you would be more sympathetic towards the Hulk and Dr. Banner."

"Are you crazy?" Sirius damn-near squeaked. "Did you see the size of that thing? Did you see the speed with which it moved? That was like facing a werewolf-giant!"

Luna had to concede that. "But you know that the Hulk is not under Dr. Banner's control. The poor man was experimented upon, and has been fleeing to avoid damaging anything or hurting anyone."

"And I sympathise, but that doesn't mean the Hulk doesn't scare me. Moony did too. And now I am doubly scared because that damn idiot Harry has gone hunting for Banner. He is a grown-up and everything. Bugger me if I don't worry though."

"Harry is no longer afflicted by Wrackspurts enough," Luna said, attempting to assure the man.

"We are talking about the same bloke, right?"

* * *

The subject of Sirius' worry, at that moment was by no means in danger. He was only cursing every single higher entity he could remember. First it was that horrible illusion Luna and Sirius had cast, and now this. He really didn't want to see anyone naked, and Banner was very much so. So he conjured a large rough cloth over the man.

He waited patiently for about five minutes, before a controlled jet of water had Banner spluttering awake.

"Are you alright, Banner?"

Being addressed by his name had Bruce's paranoia fighting for headspace with the neural pain stimuli caused by the transformation. He replied groggily and inelegantly, therefore. "Whoryu?"

"Yeah, never mind. If you want to get away unscathed, I suggest you move on now. The mercenaries are still around."

Since Banner was displaying the same symptoms that Moony did after a full moon, Harry shifted the man into a seated position with practised ease. Heavy breathing, very low residual human body strength, low cognisance of his surroundings...the list of symptoms checked out.

Frankly, Harry was unsure as to what he was going to do once he found Banner. He was a person of interest for SHIELD and a multitude of organisations that wanted to utilise him, the Hulk, or both. Reasonably sure that he was on the run from the US Army, and also reasonably sure that even if SHIELD intervened for the US Citizen to protect his rights they would still treat him as an asset, may be point the Hulk in the direction of something SHIELD wanted destroyed, or use the man's research for everything except for what he might be promised, any course of action that put this man on the path towards either organisation was a bad idea. And these were only government organisations.

So Harry sat on a rock, cursing his own stupidity at rushing in without a plan. After over twelve years of practice doing otherwise, one could hope that he would never make the same mistakes as before. The last time he had rushed in without a plan, Sirius and Hermione had almost died, and four other friends had been in danger. That was the night he had vowed to change and the kid gloves had come off, and the Death Eaters had learnt to fear him. But that was another time with no bearing on the here and now.

His thoughts turned to Remus again. Whatever brought over the change from Banner to Hulk was similar to whatever change occurred for Remus, though undoubtedly, the triggers were different. It bought a series of questions – or the right questions, as Gienah always said as she coaxed him into the habit of asking them – to his mind, though not necessarily in order of priority.

Was this man trustworthy? If he was, would he accept magic? Would he be an asset for them, but with the understanding why he, and not the Hulk was an asset, with at least a semblance of honesty? Importantly, since any such action would put the responsibility for such a man on his head, could he be controlled? Would Banner be willing to at least provisionally trust him? Would the Ministry of Magic or the Unspeakables accept this man to start with? How would they get him to England if all the other issues were resolved? On that at least, the idea of back channels to change his citizenship to British was an obvious solution. But then he was also a declared fugitive. On balance, it didn't feel right to leave this man to his own devices, but with the slightly strained relations with the US on certain matters, was it worth it?

As for the man himself, the solution was exceedingly simple – Legillimency, an art that he was now more than fluent at. Harry had long since lost any compunction to do things that were sometimes neither right nor easy in order to get the required results. It had made him valuable in the War even more, and had made him valuable to SNAFU also. Facing danger is one thing. Getting morals in the way of solving a problem when not solving the problem is the greater danger...yeah, it would be safe to say that Harry had long since grown past that.

* * *

 **31st October, 1996**

* * *

Since that fateful night at the Ministry in June 1996, Harry had changed. While the ideal of doing what is right instead of easy was great for idealists, it didn't lend itself to the bigger picture always. He had seen Death Eaters willing to kill children first hand, for the second time. He had seen people he cared for nearly die, all over again. And he had heard the Prophecy. It had changed what he believed in.

Four months later, when Voldemort had launched an attack on both the Burrow and the Dursleys to draw him out, obviously, in a recap of the plan to use Sirius, Harry had taken a cold decision. He had gone to protect the Dursleys, and started off with the disarming spell, long considered to be his trademark. The attack on the Burrow had promptly been abandoned, as the call of "This is Potter!" had rung through the Death Eaters, including at the Burrow. Tonks, who, unable to stop him from rushing out in anger, had joined him at the fight in Surrey had confirmed as much through communications with Order members at the Burrow.

Fifteen minutes later, as more Order members and Death Eaters alike poured into the muggle neighbourhood, they had been greeted by a horror-struck Tonks, a burning Number 4, Privet Drive, and the charred and burnt pieces of what remained of the bodies of the first twelve Death Eaters who had participated in the attack. Only the interference of the Order had managed to prevent sixteen more Death Eaters from joining their dead brethren. It had been only one spell, cast with deadly precision, in a no-holds-barred manner – the Piercing Spell. And then they had been set on fire.

A horrified Order had had to debrief him.

Bill had a question. "Why did you go to protect the Dursleys?"

"Even though you may not believe it, I know how Voldemort thinks. He wanted to draw me out. He may not know how much of a home I ever considered Privet Drive, but he knows, because of Pettigrew, that I certainly cared for the Burrow. If I had gone there, Voldemort would have come there, after the Death Eaters had caused enough damage and killed most of you. Going to Surrey drew them away from the Burrow. One of the attacks was always a diversion."

"So you sacrificed the Dursleys?" Elphias Doge had asked in even more horrified fascination.

"I am not Voldemort," Harry had coldly retorted. "I detest the Dursleys, but not enough to have them killed. They are innocent in this war."

"He had me cast a compulsion spell to get the Dursleys away," Tonks admitted.

"But it was a muggle neighbourhood," Molly protested, still finding it difficult to digest the cold logic. "We could have fought back! They were defenceless."

"That's precisely why I killed them," Harry replied. "Since you were fighting back, and since they were called away, they did not stop to do further damage. At Privet Drive, they would have cast Fiendfyre."

"How do you know about that spell?"

"Voldemort is after me. I am not going to lie down on my back, and show my belly and wait for him to come kill me. He wants a war, and I will give him one. That includes knowing how he works – and after what happened with Mr. Weasley and Sirius, you know how I know. And studying how those beasts attacked people is useful enough, I should think."

"But, Harry killing..."

"They were unprepared for that response from me, and they did not get time to cause collateral damage. I have no more patience, and no more mercy. This war, it's on me. I let Pettigrew go. I showed mercy. What happened to Sirius? That's on me. Cedric's death is on me. Bertha Jorkins is on me. Every death on our side, it's on me. I am going to make sure that I can avoid as many as I can. I remain as responsible as the actual killers for their deaths. The only way out is to change. Their death is the only solution."

"That's stupid and you know it," Remus admonished, even as many others spoke in support of the man and in an attempt to console Harry. "If not Peter, it would have been someone else, maybe Crouch himself."

Harry refused to respond.

"I didn't think that it would come to this, Harry," Dumbledore had tiredly said, at last. He looked even more tired at Harry's glare. "When I told you the prophecy, I did not think you would take it literally. I did not think it would affect you so. As you are so keen to say, "That's on me." This escalation will not go without a response."

"I know," Harry bit out, glaring at the table. "All along, he has wanted us to fear him. I did take it literally. This is my war now, and I have blood on my hands. Now I am going to make them fear me. I am not good enough, but I bloody well will try." He looked at the Headmaster resolutely. "Are you going to report me or expel me?"

Dumbledore scrutinised him for a long moment, but with a sad – and was it defeated acceptance? – smile. "No. Today, the course of this war has been set. I have failed to protect you. I have failed to ensure that this war never occurred. And you have shown yourself capable to meet this challenge, however much I do not wish this course of action for you."

Dumbledore ignored the protests. He had been warned. He had hoped for more time to do it on his terms. He had sought to change the path that was laid out in front of them. He had tried to avoid it by every means possible. But people meet their destiny on the road they take to avoid it.

"Harry, I will teach you to win."

That night, the whispers that kept Harry awake at night, the ones in the voice that always helped him defeat the Imperius Curse, which accused him of not doing enough, which branded him a failure, the one responsible for so many deaths, had quietened down with a satisfied purr, a purr that had almost been corporeal. And learn he did. And even though the whispers surfaced sometimes in his times of doubt, consolidating the path he was now on, Harry did emerge victorious, if not the Harry he had been when he was younger and a better person.

And Gienah Black, who had been monitoring the Hall of Prophecy since the debacle in June, had been the sole witness that Halloween night as the inscription, "L.V. (?)", on the Prophecy, which, since it hadn't been fulfilled had simply reformed, had started to slowly blur, while Harry's name just grew bold.

What it portended, only time would tell.

And when they did win the War, and yet the Prophecy remained unchanged, but the other name remained untold, Gienah had to intercede, with contingencies changing as each day went. At least, as one of the few confidants Dumbledore had had to cultivate in desperation as he withered to death, she had some assurance regarding Potter's true nature when he had fought to win, and yet, also sacrificed himself to win. But would that hold true forever?

As for Harry, the whispers never truly ceased.

* * *

"Who are you?" Banner growled, more lucid this time.

"The question, Dr. Banner, is who are you?"

Bruce Banner barely had time before Harry skimmed his thoughts. The man had been working on Gamma Radiation, which scared Harry, for Hermione had mentioned it in passing, on a false premise fed to him. The objective was to recreate the Super Soldier Serum. Thereafter, it was a litany of horrors, among the worst being a reference that Banner had found to Camp Cathcart. Barely a minute passed in the real world, but it was a glimpse of the lifetime of pain and terror Bruce Banner had survived.

Harry smiled to himself as he realised that his hopes for the man were true. He was practically a muggle Remus.

"What did you do?" Banner demanded gutturally, once Harry stopped the onslaught, on the verge of yet another transformation.

"I checked whether you were a threat or just a bloke dealt a crap hand. I learnt that the "crap hand" is an understatement, but not the worst I have seen."

"You...you are some kind of mutant or something. You read my mind!" Bruce accused, a bit thrown off by the calm response from the British guy.

"Not a mutant, though or something is a closer estimation. And no, I didn't read your mind. I invaded your memories," Harry corrected. "You have every right to get angry at me, though I would not advise it. As it stands, I understand you were running a medical camp. You were attacked."

Bruce's memories of his recent transformation were still fresh.

"Yes."

"Well you were attacked by the mercenaries of the local overlord or whatever that wanted your supplies. You transformed. We were in the locality, and stunned the gun-toting idiots, but you were apparently too angry to calm down, so you turned on the people you were helping. We didn't know what your intentions were, Dr. Banner."

"Who's "we"? And how do you know my name but not my intentions?"

"My godfather, my friend and I, we are, believe it or not, actually on a holiday. And I...uh...occupy a minor position in some special channels of the British government and was deputised to liaise with those across the pond, so your name and circumstances were known to me. Your designation as a fugitive, however, is, to put it bluntly, wrong."

"Were you here to arrest me?"

"Since currently I am not on any official assignment, I would have had no authority to do so in a foreign land..."

"That has never stopped people of your kind before."

"As I was saying before you rudely interrupted me, I am only on a holiday, and feel no inclination to be drawn back into my job, at the moment, since the letter and spirit of the law are not in agreement where you are concerned. I did intend to head you away from where you could do too much damage, anyway. I would not be a consummate professional if I did not investigate your circumstances to my satisfaction and blindly turned you in, instead."

"What, you Brits and the US are at odds since I last went off grid?" Bruce asked derisively, unable to retain enough anger in the face of the man's calm demeanour and words to transform.

"Disagreements do occur in every relationship, Dr. Banner, even in those as old and as storied as the diplomatic ones between my country and yours."

Bruce relaxed a bit. "What are you going to do? And why should I believe you? You could be lying, for all I know."

"The precaution is commendable. I am afraid I am not in a position to reassure you, at the moment. In good faith, however, if you would agree to it, of course, I would request you to join my companions and me for the duration of our stay in Brazil, which extends for only two more days."

"If I don't agree?" asked Bruce.

"Then I shall bid you good day, and shall take your leave."

"Just like that?"

"Yes. As I said, I find no reason to act beyond my current remit, not when you are clearly trying to avoid human contact in order to not be a danger."

"And if I join you, you will not seek to use me?"

"Since I know for a fact that you have been in Brazil before, and are back here, rightly assuming that most people would not look for you where they had already found you, I would assume that you have some rudimentary proficiency in the local languages. I would welcome help as a translator, if you wished to help, of course."

"That's it?"

"Yes. I would pay you for your services too, and whether or not you would like to listen to what I have to say, and whether you would wish to part even after hearing what I have to say, shall remain solely your choice."

"And you want nothing to do with the Other Guy, or with Gamma radiation or anything?"

"I do not. However, I believe that an opportunity may arise to keep you off-grid, and my superiors may insist on studying your transformation then. That is not a given," Harry said loudly, cutting off Bruce's impending argument. "Listen carefully to what I am saying. We want a way to understand your transformation, and more than the transformation, it is you, not the Other Guy who is more important for us, if it comes to that. We have people afflicted by a certain disease, shall we say, that, under the right circumstances, very much mimics what you are undergoing. They are discriminated against by society. If we can wrangle it, any resources that we can procure for you, fully within the ambit of the British Government, fully with the knowledge of the American Government, shall be made available to you so that we can help cure our people. The only use, beyond our stay in Brazil, which I would put you to, is as a bio-chemist, and a good man who would seek to cure those in a similar condition as your own."

"There are other Hulks?" Had Samuel Stern spread the disease?

"Not that I know of," Harry honestly replied. "Unless you count the Abomination, but I understand you have taken care of him. No. This transformation is similar, yet different, because it seems to spread through bite and other violent contact."

Bruce would be lying through his teeth if he said he was not hooked.

"You don't want a super soldier?"

"No. As I understand, such a matter is not of much use to us. Also any experiments that may be required will be under the strictest of protocols, that we hope the scientists in question will help design, and with the full agreement of the participants. So we won't allow anything like Camp Cathcart either."

"How would you know that?"

"I just read your mind, didn't I?"

Bruce just huffed. He could honestly say that he was beyond intrigued. But this was not the first time he had been sweet-talked into something. This could still be a trap.

"Why should I cooperate with strangers?"

"Indeed, that was very rude of me." Harry held his hand out for Bruce to shake. "I am Harry Potter."

Bruce scrutinised the hand for a minute. Then he shrugged and shook it. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Potter." He gingerly stood up, clutching the cloth to protect his dignity. "I don't remember having it."

Harry nodded. "You didn't."

"And I don't think I am appropriately dressed for any civilised meeting."

"You aren't." Harry knew that he had reeled the man in with something interesting; he had a decade of dealing with people of all sorts after all. Learning to talk was a skill he had had to gain, and it was hard-earned. Now, if he wanted the man to trust him, then some magic deep in the Amazons would be an appropriate secret to trade with Banner. "Well, about that..." he started, drawing out his wand again.

"I knew this was too good to be true," Bruce said with a snort. "Please, I don't want to hurt you. Just go."

Harry ignored him and simply conjured a shirt, a pair of trousers and some underwear. Bruce's eyes bugged out of his head. "This is an apt demonstration of the "or something" that I am. Please try those on. If they are the wrong size, we can alter them."

"What are you?"

"Please, Dr. Banner. I have been perfectly polite. Please don't insinuate that I am anything but human. And irrespective of your refusal to believe due to your scientific background, I am sure you can remember enough myths and legends to make an educated guess."

"But magic is..."

"Perfectly real, as I have just demonstrated. I would hurry and get out of here, if I were you. We aren't too far from the base of those gunmen."

Bruce cautiously took the clothes. "If you would please..."

"Of course, Dr. Banner," was the amiable reply, as Harry stepped behind another tree. There, he conjured his Patronus. "Gienah, do you think stealing Banner from them is a good enough response for what they did to me? I think I can coax him. I have scoped him out; he is practically a muggle Remus. Tell me what happens. We have him around for two days. If you send a message, remember, he'll be with us. He is a bit too skittish, obviously." He was just done when Bruce called him out.

"Hey, Mr. Potter, I think the pants are a bit tight."

"It would be a bit difficult for me to adjust without looking, or invading your privacy."

"Well, you surely did that magic thingy when I was naked. Now I am not so..."

"But your pants..."

Bruce grimaced. "Right, you're a Brit. My...uh...trousers are too tight."

"Right," Harry replied, relief clear in his voice, remedying the situation with a flick of the wand.

"That's handy," Bruce commented. "Hey, listen, with that...uh...magic thingy, you could do anything, right? Make me believe..."

"Yes I can make you believe anything. But I am not. I was being perfectly honest. I have, shall we say, some personal investment in the matter."

"So the Salem Witch Trials...?"

"Yes."

"And unicorns and centaurs and vampires and werewolves...?"

"Yes. Werewolves are what I was referring to."

"Are you one?"

"No. My uncle is. At least you remain vaguely human. He turns into a wolf. A potion, Wolfsbane as we call it, allows him to keep his mind, though it is poisonous to people who aren't werewolves. If this opportunity works out, we can help you study it, though you would have to set up a lab from scratch, as magic and conventional electronics do not interact well."

"There's no work on Gamma radiation?"

"In the spirit of honesty, I can tell you that the Gamma radiation angle is being investigated for it. I wouldn't know. I am not a scientist or researcher."

And Bruce was completely hooked.

* * *

"That bastard," Gienah choked as she burst out laughing. "What are the odds?" She sent an intradepartmental call to the so-called "Potter Watch".

"You called?"

"Yes, Croaker, Bowtruckle, Demiguise, Granger, come in. I did call. Our wayward kid has brought a new complexity."

"He was attacked?"

"No. He seems about to bring you a present, Granger. You might want to do something _really_ good for him." Gienah's innuendoes were so normal that Hermione barely twitched. "He's convincing Banner to join us."

"WHAT?"

"Oh, yes. He seems to have befriended Bruce Banner, and has suggested stealing the man from the Yanks as recompense for what they did to him."

"He is an international fugitive," Croaker temporised.

"And bloodying Fury's nose, and having him work some channels in exchange for a few names, seems something that we can benefit from, especially when we get Banner in the bargain."

"It's risky."

"Yes."

"And it would mean MACUSA and the traitors therein knowing all that SHIELD and we know."

"We will be allowing them _some_ information," Gienah allowed, stressing meaningfully on "some".

"And the Muggle government?"

"There might be an issue with the Visa, but since Potter has revealed magic, I can offer a letter of invitation for research purposes. Otherwise, I intend to ask them to treat this as a case of asylum, something to hold over the heads of the Americans for human rights violations."

"It would accelerate so many projects, and having someone like Banner," Hermione argued, quivering with excitement and uncaring of all the other implications. Oh, she bloody well was going to do something really good for Harry.

"Which is what I am thinking," agreed Gienah. "Apparently, the fugitive status is debatable. In Potter's words, the man is a "muggle Remus"."

"Do you want him here?" Demiguise asked.

"It is something to contemplate, isn't it?"

"Do we turn our investigation over to them?"

"Why would we do something so asinine? A few well-chosen top-level names and half of the MACUSA traitors, and HYDRA, and that's it. We aren't sacrificing our eyes and ears in both organisations."

"That is a sound option."

"Get to it. Weigh the options, choose the disposable ones. I have old Nick Fury to talk to."

* * *

"You're some weird cyborgs or something?" was Bruce's first question to Sirius.

"I do pick up girls with that one," Sirius replied happily.

Bruce only gave Sirius a strange look.

"And you're his girlfriend?"

"No," Luna replied simply. "One can have friends and like them a lot without being girlfriends or boyfriends."

"Right, sorry."

"So this magic thingy is real."

"Yes."

"Well, that's one way to make a scientist's brain melt, I suppose."

Luna stared at Bruce intently. "Do you suppose it would mix with your blood?"

Brue couldn't summon up a good enough reply. "I doubt it would matter much," he said lamely. "One would be dead anyway."

There was an awkward silence as none of them knew what to say.

"So, how's this going to work?"

"I don't know," confessed Sirius. "I am just accompanying the kid."

"He is a kid, to you?"

"He is my godson, and I have twenty-one years on him. I've changed his nappies too, so yeah, he is kid."

"You don't look it."

"Why, thank you," Sirius replied. "But I only use being a cyborgs to pick girls, sorry."

"And I suppose you are all hard metal then?" Bruce retorted.

Sirius grinned broadly. "Oi Harry! I like this one! Can we keep him?"

Harry snorted as he placed their beer glasses on the table in that self-service pub. "You're dog enough for all of us Sirius. Ah, but yes, you were almost killed by a curtain and can't turn into one now, can you?"

"Git," the godfather bit out.

"Sorry, what's that about a dog?"

"Sirius had a bad...accident, shall we say, which is why his entire right side had to be reconstructed. The metal doesn't do too well for transformation. Before that, he had mastered a special kind of magic, and was an animagus. He could turn into a large Black dog at will."

"You have a very accurate name then," Bruce remarked, mostly in wonder.

"That I am. But you haven't met my best mate, Remus Lupin."

"That's the uncle you were talking about?"

"Yes."

"You're all mad."

"You're not the first to say that."

"Can't Mr. Lupin do that then?"

"Remus can't control the moon, now, can he?" Luna pointed out. "We don't know anything about the disease scientifically. So there's no knowing what works and what doesn't."

Bruce nodded in understanding as he chugged the beer. "So, as I was asking Mr. Black, how will this work?"

"The easiest way would be to grant you asylum, but you are from the US, our allies. So we have to see which toes can be trodden on. Best case, you become a British National."

Bruce looked discomfited. "And that only replaces the US army with the British."

"Secrecy and peace are two things that can be managed for you, Bruce, within reason, that is."

"It's my home."

"Which you're being chased away from," Luna countered.

Bruce had no answer to that.

"What after that?"

"Well, that would depend. Curing the werewolves is what would be your main work. There're well over five hundred werewolves in Britain alone. And then, maybe, helping us understand magic in scientific terms to help prove that we are human to those who see us as weapons, and proving that we are only human to those of us who are anti-muggle bigots would help. But that isn't my part. I am not a researcher, as I told you."

That was something Bruce could accept.

* * *

"Fury," spoke a voice from the grotesque painting right behind the director.

Director Fury grimaced. MACUSA was the last organisation he wanted to deal that day, after Potter had gone off the map. "Yes?"

"Acting Secretary of Magic Bison requests your immediate presence, alone."

The words sparked a flurry of momentary bewilderment and panic in the man, before he accepted. Gathering his arms, he stepped through the door behind the painting.

"Madam," he ventured.

"Please, be seated, Director."

Olivia Bison was a middle-aged woman. She had been, till a few moments ago, been the Deputy. Her predecessor, Patricia Rice was lying bound on the floor not a few feet from her.

"As you can see, Director, there is an emergency, since my predecessor was compromised by an organisation that has already infiltrated yours. Our friends from the Old Country had some information to share. It seems your immediate superiors are suspect as well."

"And may I know who this friend is, and what organisation has infiltrated us?"

"As for the organisation, it's an old enemy. Captain Rogers sacrificed himself to bring them down. You might remember HYDRA."

Fury's blood nearly froze in his veins. Then again, he showed no expression to confirm that.

"And you must remember me, since my last words to you were to not overstep your bounds with Potter, Nick Fury."

It was official. Colonel Fury was having a bad day.

"Corvus," he recognised.

"Indeed."

"You seem to have broken the agreement we had with them, Fury. They have documented it. Your hand in it is very visible, I must say. That's very shoddy work," Secretary Bison rebuked.

There was nothing Fury could say.

"If a man has been assigned to my team, it is my natural necessity to know his skills, weaknesses and what to do if he goes bad," Fury argued.

"Not without the agreement of the man's parent nation, Fury. Please. Let's not descend to children's fights," Gienah placidly said.

"What do you want?"

"Every scrap of information you have accrued. And I mean it. I am sure that certain diplomatic channels can be very horribly damaged unless this situation is addressed. Since I am sure that Madam Bison will want the information herself, I will be willing to share it with her. Had you not gone over our heads, Fury, and requested it of us instead, we might have even shared more than you shall get."

He glared at the woman, but Nick Fury knew he had no ground to stand on. The problem wasn't getting the information. It was getting caught.

"I understand you have some information for me, in return?"

"You understand incorrectly."

"Director..." Fury started, bristling.

"We are here because of your mistakes – I could be persuaded to call it a crime – against a citizen of my nation who had been assigned to your team to further the magical-non-magical cooperation between our countries. We need to deal with the other matter separately."

"I am afraid..."

"You should be. You should be afraid, and grateful that I have larger matters to handle."

"I see." He stood to leave.

"Oh, and Fury, please don't try to hide anything. I could simply complain regarding your attack on one of my people, and then pick any code names and places from your head. And I would be justified in doing so. Please remember to not tread on my nation's sovereignty. Each person is the Nation for us."

Nick Fury had to comply. While it could be caught up in bureaucratic red-tape, he would be accused of causing harm to US-UK relations. He had been caught in a very vulnerable position. It took them most of the day, but it was done to Gienah's satisfaction.

"As promised, Madam Secretary," she said as she offered a dossier about Harry, heavily edited and redacted, with a flourish.

"Now, about those names," Fury prompted.

"You're compromised right at the top. But I will give you a name to start – Jasper Sitwell," Gienah replied unhurriedly. "I have ten more, and some high profile names. But let's talk about the deal first, now, shall we? I need you to exert as much pressure as you can to ensure that Bruce Banner's change of nationality to British proceeds without a hitch. It's not right to let a man be on the run till he becomes useful to you again."

Nicholas Fury almost managed to resemble his name. This was shaping up to be the worst defeat of his career.

* * *

It was late on the night of the twenty-first of February in Brazil that Corvus sent in a message to Harry. The Hulk had nearly made an appearance when the glowing raven speaking in her voice appeared.

"Harry, and Dr. Banner if you are there, good evening. Dr. Banner, please allow me to be the first to congratulate you on your change of status. You are no longer a fugitive, and your nationality procedure, should you choose to change it to British will be expedited at the end of five years, since your VISA application will also be expedited on your current US passport. I would advise you to choose as soon as possible, since Thaddeus Ross is still a signatory to this on some level. Please present yourself at the closest British or American Embassy within the next forty-eight hours. This will be considered an acceptance."

Bruce nearly broke down.

* * *

So I watched Avengers Endgame. On the plus side, Carol Danvers is a minor Deus Ex Machina and can be worked around. On the minus side...I don't feel so good Mr. Feige.


	6. And It All Starts

**And It All Starts**

A/N: Trigger Warning: Child Death and language.

Thanks to jcampbellohten, stars90, Halo Star Wars X-over fan for the reviews, and to all those who follow this story and have marked it as a favourite.

* * *

"We still had a couple of days in Brazil," Sirius grumbled as the three travellers and their newly acquired companion landed in merry old England.

"Quit whining already!" Harry irritably snapped. Luna, who had claimed the window seat, merely opened her eyes and blinked blearily. She had forgone the use of the headrest and decided that Harry's bony shoulder was a much better pillow. The awkward position had only added to his discomfort, and that coupled with the normal irritability most passengers display after long-distance travels, made Harry seem like a particularly benign and mulish kin to the Blast-Ended Skrewts.

"Well, Dr. Banner probably didn't," Corvus mildly remarked, very accustomed to her nephew's behaviour to pay it any mind. She had shown a face (not necessarily her own) for the duration of the American sojourn. Around them, the Auror guard that she had scrounged up at the last moment was on high alert. It was more for purposes of formality, since she had no doubt the between them, Sirius, Luna and Harry could easily take on anyone should the objections to Bruce Banner's new status become too strenuous. A legally ratified protective contingent accompanying her was for the benefit of such objectors. She had taken extra care to stay behind and receive them in person at the embassy.

Bruce was, as was his wont, skittish and paranoid and doing his best to not set anyone off. Years on the run and having his trust betrayed had left the man on a perpetual state of high alert when it came to dealing with other people, and here he had been pushed into a situation where he had no reason to trust the people in question. He had somehow, inexplicably, just gone with the flow as these people, whoever they really were, had pulled some strings to make him a free man. True, being presented in front of the embassy and not being arrested on sight was pleasantly jarring, but it had also somewhat put him on higher alert, still believing it to be a trap. He only relaxed slightly when he breezed through Immigration and Customs processes on his own passport for the first time in several years. Being a stowaway on boats and smuggling dens, and relying on the silence and goodwill of any that he treated with his limited medical knowledge had never been a kind experience.

"Are you alright, Dr. Banner?"

"I am, thank you," Bruce answered politely, still a bit wary, but seeing as how he received no more perusal than the next person, he _was_ relaxing a bit. And that was considering the fact that they had just flown. The Other Guy positively **_hated_** flying.

"You feel no urge to let go and strut around as Mr. Green?" Sirius joked blithely.

Bruce looked at him in a manner that clearly showed that he was unsure as to how to reply, so he simply settled for a timid, "Not at this time."

"Merlin, man, I was joking," Sirius assured.

"An unfortunate side-effect of our company, Dr. Banner, as you will soon find, is having to endure what Sirius believes is a sense of humour," Gienah tiredly explained. "You might get some reference when you understand that he has not yet missed a chance to make a "time of the month" joke regarding his werewolf friend."

"That's right. I have known them since 1993. I have heard that joke since I was young enough to be scandalised by it."

Somehow, this simple, blithe, and nonchalant acceptance of the fact that he could turn into the Hulk, truly disarmed Bruce. This man, Sirius, was absurd. He had never yet met anyone who could joke about that. Sirius, of course, was far from stupid. The running gag that James and he had run through their time at Hogwarts was a concerted effort to keep Moony's spirits up. It didn't hurt to try the same with this Banner bloke. Gienah and Harry had easily aided his efforts.

Bruce just had to ask. "Are you not afraid? I mean, I can understand being curious, but everyone's afraid."

"Perhaps, Dr. Banner," Luna lightly interrupted, "it has always just been you who's been afraid of everyone being afraid of you that's keeping you alone."

Bruce found nothing to say to that as their little party made their way out of Heathrow. Was it arrogance or was it ignorance that made these people behave in such an unbothered manner? Either that, or they were being very careful and civil to him. Whatever it was, it confused Bruce and a confused Bruce wasn't a happy Bruce, but certainly not an angry Bruce either.

"Harry!" a voice called out, breaking his reverie, and he saw Potter respond with a genuine smile as he moved towards a brown-haired woman who proceeded to hug him tightly. "Come on quick, I have got the car, and we better move fast! You wouldn't know what I had to do and how I had to fight for parking space!"

"I bloody taught you to drive when even your dad who was teaching us couldn't," Potter protested. "I know London, thank you very much."

"Yes, yes," the woman hurriedly brushed that off. She was presumably a close friend if their bantering comfort was any indication.

"Will you be going to...?" "Corvus" as he knew the hooded woman to be asked leadingly.

"Islington," the woman answered. "Do you want me to...?"

"I would prefer a portkey after enduring a tin can for eight hours, thank you," Corvus replied.

"No appreciation for technology, I tell you," Sirius muttered at Bruce's general direction. "Crabby old lady!"

Corvus ignored Sirius with ease. "Dr. Banner, please rest for the day and tomorrow. I shall have Harry bring you to your new digs, professionally speaking, two days hence. It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"I cannot thank you enough, Ma'am," Bruce politely responded. "It is a treasure to be a free man."

The older woman nodded once, and then proceeded to vanish in a swirl of lights with their accompanying guard, leaving a fairly discombobulated Bruce Banner with an odd assortment of wizards and witches.

"I apologise for the haphazardness of this whole situation, Dr. Banner," the hitherto un-introduced woman spoke, "but your arrival was in no way planned, and it might be risky to have you in public spaces just as yet. Except for the security check-ins and other processes, magic ensured that you drew no attention. To keep that up till you are out of public memory, we think it would be prudent to have you stay with Sirius and Harry, till you know your way around well enough as well."

She said this all at a very high speed.

"I understand, Miss..."

"Yeah, no introductions, just start bossing the new bloke around," Harry jibed. "Dr. Banner, this is Hermione Granger. She will be working with you on the same issue as we discussed, and has been studying your work on Gamma rays to understand how they would react with magic. She might be a little star-struck, so forgive her."

"It is an honour to meet you, Dr. Banner."

"And mine, Ms. Granger," Bruce automatically answered. He had been shoved so far out of his element with so much human interaction that he was mostly proffering automatic responses. All in all, he knew that he had just started out living a new life, in the strangest manner possible.

The ride to a suburban area in North London, if his bearings were right, was a bit quiet. And given the snail's pace that they were moving with, Bruce reckoned they would need a fairly long time. Putting himself in the limelight had never been his nature, but given how he had been somewhat legally acquired by these people without much information to go with it, he felt a bit like the gladiators sold and bought in ancient Rome.

"So, where are we going?"

"My place," Sirius Black answered. "You must have been pushed out of any semblance of comfort in this whole affair, so we figured it would be better for you to stay with us while you get to know London and also till the news of your new status is widely spread to prevent any trouble for you, just in case."

Bruce nodded. Unfortunately, having that question answered to his satisfaction (to an extent), left no openings for further conversation. He was not sure whether that was intentional; giving any pertinent information in one go usually stops the flow of questions from someone who is very uncomfortable and not normally aggressive.

"Dr. Banner, please do feel free to ask us whatever occurs to your mind," Hermione offered. "You were uprooted from Brazil, and bundled off here without even a by your leave, so we can understand if you are unsure."

"Indeed, Dr. Banner, we will answer, as honestly as we can, and not at all if we can't," Harry added.

"This was better than a lie, I suppose," Banner declared with a wry air. "Alright, let's have it then. Witches, wizards, all this magic and everything; how does nobody know?"

"We are legally bound to secrecy. The Statue of Secrecy came in not a moment too soon for us. America had the Salem Witch Trials, and by the time any repercussions were felt here to add to witch hunts already taking place, magicals were mostly hidden."

"So, your kind were murdered?"

"You know, you keep saying your kind as if we are not human or are a different species," Harry noted bluntly an undercurrent of polite irritation not hiding as well as he intended it to. He had always had a bad reaction to people who did that, the Dursleys being prime examples of that.

Bruce had learnt to note these changes and to not ignore them. His days without transformations often depended on such cues. Implications regarding the super- or extra-human nature of magicals were a sore point for Potter. "You could be, for all I know. Manipulation of energy the way you showed me is not possible for just any human. Your biology could be so vastly different in spite of your similar or humanoid features externally. It could very well be an extra set of hormones or enzymes, or a slight mutation in any or your organs. It could be a mutated gene. I don't exactly have any data to go by. So, I am not sure how you can be proven to be, what was it you said? Humans to some and only human to others."

"That is quite the hypothesis. However, Dr. Banner, let me assure you that we are quite human. My parents – biological parents who raised me, I might add – are perfectly non-magical dentists, after all, and Harry's maternal grandparents were non-magical too."

"You don't have familial antecedents?"

"Not that I know of," Hermione answered. "None of my grandparents and their parents were in any manner magical. I am also very sure that at least three of my great-grandparents would have shunned me as a child of the Devil."

"That's fascinating." Then he stopped and realised that his response had been rather at odd with Ms. Granger's last statement. "I mean, it's terrible with the shunning."

Hermione just laughed at the inadvertent gaffe. "Never mind. It's not surprising. I am sure you find matters of your interest fascinating."

Bruce nodded gratefully. "So, you are what, like the next stage of evolution?"

"That is unlikely. Documented history proves the presence of magicals for at least the times since the Egyptians through their hieroglyphs and in Ancient Indian civilisations. If we were to be the next stage in evolution, Magic would have become a significant trait. But even among people who have been magicals for several generations, there are people born without the ability to use or manipulate it. I believe that both evolutions may be concurrent and meant to eventually mix so that humanity evolved as a whole."

"More like a trait that can go recessive then," Bruce mused out loud. "Then my initial question to you about genetic mutation may not be so wrong after all," he said to Harry.

"It's all Greek to me," Harry replied with a shrug.

With another topic over for the time, Bruce peered out of the window contemplatively.

"You know, I never asked. What is it that you do? I just know that Mr. Black is your godfather, Ms. Lovegood is your friend, and you have a minor position in the government."

Hermione snorted incredulously. "Mycroft Holmes, Harry?" she demanded. "He doesn't have "a minor position" in the government, Dr. Banner. Harry was the de facto second-in-command to the Minister, the highest elected office in Magical Britain till two years ago, by popular demand. You will find that Harry has an infuriating knack for underestimation."

"But you look barely twenty!"

"I am nearly twenty-seven actually."

"But you were what, twenty-five when you left?"

"I didn't leave. I was reassigned to the field."

Bruce didn't ask whether that was a demotion.

"No, it wasn't a demotion," Harry replied, not even turning look back from the front passenger seat. "And no, I didn't read your mind," he clarified at Bruce's shocked expression. "I still need eye contact for that. But you don't hide your shock too well, and I can see your face in the rear-view mirror."

"Harry," Hermione tersely demanded, "do you honestly believe that irritating Dr. Banner is the wisest course of action?"

"Oh, he can keep Mr. Green in, Hermione. He runs into many irritants daily. It is when there is true danger that he turns." This time he turned around. "And that, Dr. Banner, I gleaned from your memories." Turning again, he spoke to Hermione, "Dr. Banner deserves as much truth as he can digest and a straight refusal with reasons, as of now. Once he acclimatises to magic on a daily basis, we can tell him more. And he has already experienced my brand of legillimency."

"For a person who held such a high post, you don't really believe too much in diplomacy, do you?" Bruce asked wryly.

"Horses for courses, Doctor; you care for facts more than diplomacy. You seem to be one of those people who'd rather know where you stand with people than guess."

Bruce couldn't exactly deny that.

"Why were you reassigned then?"

"He refused to go to Afghanistan on the argument that magic was an escalation that could cause the war to be bloodier, and that international pressure on the magical communities in those regions could easily avert that kind of escalation from their side," Hermione answered in Harry's stead. "And he dissuaded most magicals from active participation. Your Lieutenant General Ross wanted you as a weapon. They wanted the same from magicals across the Nations actively participating in the War. But Harry's word carries some not inconsiderable weight especially when he pointed out that the war could reveal many secrets of magic closely guarded by all the Nations, not least regarding magical development that they would want to keep to themselves."

Bruce found himself silently appraising the man who had upended his beliefs regarding the boundaries between the possible and the impossible in a span of five days. The man's weight carried enough weight to dissuade people across the world.

And he was only twenty-seven.

"Are you some kind of super-wizard or something?" The obvious inference was that the man was _very_ powerful, though it was not obvious in what way.

"For a few years till about a decade ago, I had the misfortune of being one of those involved in the resolution of a set of very uniquely unfortunate circumstances, and more to the point, having my involvement relayed to the world at large. These circumstances were, in both our worlds, closely monitored from many quarters."

The other magical occupants of the car didn't deem fit to elaborate. It made no sense to tell Bruce on his first day in England that he was stepping into a world that was nearly done being rebuilt from the ashes of a civil war. Moreover, the events surrounding the Hallows had driven home the vulnerability and fallibility of Harry Potter.

"You were a kid!" Banner protested.

"Those with adversarial inclinations were not particularly picky about whom they attacked."

The rest of the trip mostly passed in polite silence, with Sirius or Luna pointing out the magical sights of London often hidden from muggles to Bruce.

* * *

Over the course of the first two days, Bruce had taken to observe his fairly easy-going, civil and gracious hosts out of paranoia. Sirius Black, seemed to be the only full-time occupant, even though Potter was the secret-keeper of the house that appeared out of thin air. The idea of the Fidelius Charm for the security shocked Bruce beyond measure. Apparently, there had once been a Potter residence far more inviting than Grimmauld Place, but it had been razed to the ground before Harry's birth and he simply hadn't had the time to rebuild it with his duties, and since he rarely was in one place for a long stretch of time, buying or renting another place seemed pointless. Costs seemed to be concerns for wizards also. Harry often crashed on his godfather's couch.

Quite a few other people often flitted through the place, one of them being the Minister of Magic himself who was really good friends with both Black and Potter. And then there was Remus Lupin, who had come with his son, Teddy. Having been evaluated and read so easily by Potter, and now that he thought of it, acquired as an asset, Bruce had mentally listed Harry Potter as a person who dealt in people, not with them, and was not exactly the most personable person. Yet he had seen all the humanity the man possessed when the kid had jumped onto him with a yell of "Uncle Harry" and had demanded a game of Quidditch before the two engaged in what could only be termed the fastest game of tag, played in air on brooms, yelling in genuine yet fierce glee, instead.

That was short-lived however, as he spoke to Remus Lupin. Potter had assessed both him and this man he claimed to think of as family. He had the strangest feeling that he had looked into a very odd mirror, so closely their situations resembled. The man was certainly knowledgeable and also seemed to have a healthy interest and at least a layperson's understanding of the non-magical world, which seemed to be rarer than his initial contact with Potter and the others indicated.

Hermione Granger had only stayed long enough to help him settle in before she had to leave for her job. She was a fairly intelligent woman who could easily keep up with him, and he could have found less accommodating and less curious a colleague to work with. What she lacked in exposure, she made up for with sheer tenacity and a greed for knowledge he had rarely seen.

It would take him some time to settle, but he didn't feel as ill-at -ease as he had feared he would be during the transition.

It would be a hectic week. Bruce Banner had taken a bit of time to understand his new environs, and had nearly come close to going green when he was shocked every so often. It frayed his nerves a bit, enough that Harry had to explain that he had set up specific protections that would foretell any oncoming danger to any of them and that Bruce had nothing to fear, though he could always be surprised since magic surprised them as well, and often.

Then they had gone about setting up the premises for him to work, and that was when the lack of an SI unit for magic, or at least any derivability from existing SI units directly brought things to a screeching halt. It was a week of Bruce following rabbit trails regarding magic as he constantly found a new way to mould magic to his understanding, instead of the other way around.

But that part of the job, instead of frustrating Bruce, made him more excited by the minute. Indeed, the man who was so painfully shy, or stiff, that he would contribute very little to their dinner conversations, actually started off on lengthy expositions regarding the nature of magic and its manipulability. Hermione listened attentively and the two tossed theories that sometimes seemed increasingly wilder and then went about with lengthy arguments on initial hypotheses to prove or disprove them.

Eventually, Harry had had to resort to taking Hermione out for what he maintained was not a date, but had all the benign elements of one, while Sirius and Remus took Bruce to see Diagon Alley which sent him into a near ecstatic state as he marvelled at the improbability of the architecture.

* * *

"You called me?" Harry asked as he peeped inside Corvus' cabin, a whole week later.

"Yes, Potter, come in," Corvus bade. "Are you better now?"

"Yes."

"Good; I hope this is an objective self-evaluation."

"As do I," Harry quipped.

"Banner settling in well?"

"He is working up to it. At least Hermione's able to keep conversation when he starts with the science-y stuff."

"The girl does have her uses."

"Don't make her or treat her like an asset. She is a researcher here," Harry warned.

"Is that protectiveness?"

"You made Sirius and me assets, and neither of us was in a position to complain. But I draw a line there."

"Don't worry. She doesn't have the wherewithal to be one."

"I know her better than you. She would take that as a challenge and likely surprise you. Don't challenge her. Don't use her. And don't challenge her just to make her work towards being an asset either."

"Don't worry. She is more valuable to me as she is."

"Good."

Gienah just snorted. "Yes well, I didn't call you over for a chat. Are you ready to get back into the game?"

"I am, as always, at your disposal."

Nodding, Corvus paced around the room once.

"Did you read the dossier I sent with Sirius?"

"Have HYDRA infiltrated SHIELD?"

"And they know."

"Fuck."

"Quite."

Harry remained quiet as he digested the information. HYDRA were the ones who had found the Tesseract. And that in turn had fuelled the ambitions of their benefactor and beneficiary – Grindelwald. The man wanted to be the Master of Death – or at least that was supposed to be the end result of collecting the Hallows. And Harry was in the unenviable position of having done just that.

"I have a few options."

"We can cut any open confrontation. They have always used that to insert their members into the fight and to infiltrate; at least that's what your dossier implied."

"I discarded that as soon as I thought of it," she admitted.

"I could throw those things through the Veil."

The look she gave him was answer enough. "You honestly mean to wash your hands of such power that **_is_** going to be useful one day?"

"I hoped you wouldn't say that." Harry slumped into the seat. "What do you think they know, want to know or want to do?"

"I would rather not speculate," Corvus answered. "I freely admit that HYDRA has always enticed some of the brightest minds, brighter indeed than many I have encountered, who were equally heinous."

"What were you going to suggest?"

"Ignoring them superficially and keeping an eye," Gienah replied unhappily. "But I can't be sure when the iron is truly hot enough to strike."

"You fear that we are infiltrated also."

"Yes."

They sat in silence as Harry ruminated over the problem.

"We have to falsify the myth around the Hallows."

"It seems the most plausible solution."

Harry stared at her.

"Just so you know, you are a manipulative bitch."

Gienah just smiled. She hadn't needed to guide Harry much to come around to her solution after all.

"How soon?"

"Not for a bit, yet. We need you visible enough for all players, first. And I want you to have a very, very specific skill-set."

"Such as?"

"Think of it, Potter. Riddle could fly. Your father and Sirius were animaguses. You are reasonably skilled at magic and legillimency, but you could and should improve to the point where nothing short of a lack of sentience or a mind can stop you from pulling another's thoughts. You are certainly more powerful, and as skilled a fighter magically, but you use nowhere close to the imagination Dumbledore used, and not for want of imagination itself. We are going to be exposed in due course of time, what with the satellites everyone's sending into space like it's going out of fashion. If not magic itself, they are going to sense the absence of traces of normal mundane activities. You could use at least a primer in muggle technology, if not a recognised degree itself. What I am saying, Potter, is that you are good, but not the best; certainly not the best you can be. The world's getting faster, weirder and it's changing. And in the things that we deal with? It is either know, cope, use and improve, or wither and die. And that cost is going to be too much to pay, always. And I need someone competent and trustworthy helping me out."

"In spite of the thing with Hallows?"

"Indubitably."

"That's vague and too broad compared to your usual requirements, not really specific as you were claiming. What is it that you want, really? What are you aiming for?"

"In the short term, relevance for us as a society in the changing world. In the long term, I am aiming for vigilance and readiness for whatever the Universe might throw at us."

This was not Corvus, the Unspeakable, or Corvus, the Master of Enchanting speaking, or even Gienah Black, the woman who had decided that Sirius and Harry were both assets and family. Nor was she **_not_** assuming any of those roles. This was the woman with a specific vision. SHIELD had been around, long enough to have a lethal cancer within it, but also to know far more than it had any right to, and also long enough to develop an alarming degree of arrogance where its jurisdiction over the sovereignty in terms of operations as well as information were concerned. The UK had a very good Secret Service yes, but it was not augmented enough by those who dealt with matters outside the ordinary.

Magi-scientific advancement, military collaborations, international collaborative anti-terror intelligence activities; the list was endless and seemed ideal, both in her mind and on paper. It would bolster the current Secret Service, and keep the magicals relevant. Only when one is useful is one relevant. Ironically, this was the sort of thing that the Government should have asked instead of military participation on the back of an actual civil war.

And this pet project was Gienah Black's ultimate vision, a vision that she desperately needed Harry, a man who had experience of methods, motives and means, of successes and failures, as well as of being compromised, to buy into. And if that experience wasn't enough, he had also developed cynicism, paranoia, and if her observations were true, a certain amount of patriotism (perhaps it was resignation in response to SHIELD's overtures – better to be used by your own country than any other) that could not be attributed to any experience through his life till then, and a degree of ruthlessness that always sent her mind careening towards that horrible blue, glowing ball of prophecy. And as the acquisition of Banner showed, he was opportunistic. And all of this, was a far cry from the boy she had heard of from the people in the Order, before of course the summer of '96. That boy could have grown to be Britain's answer to the long-lost Captain America, and would have become a fossil, a relic of the past in the world that had changed beyond recognition.

It would not be difficult to convince Harry to do the job, though. It was going to be difficult to get him to lead such an organisation; not immediately, but in a couple of years.

Which was why she needed Kingsley, but the man was too public, too well-liked, too admired, and more importantly, even more needed than at the head of her division that would expand the ambit of the Unspeakables' operations. Sirius was the furthest from being an actual candidate. He was a very good operative if it came to it, and it often did because she knew to never let Sirius be idle, but he had scruples. People who face injustice become two things – empathetic, or vengeful. Either extreme is terrible, if not tempered by the other. Sirius' empathy was tempered, having fought in two wars, but not tempered enough.

And worse still, she knew the people between her generation and Potter's and they had failed, or aided Voldemort's rise. The good ones like Amelia Bones, Rufus Scrimgeour and even Severus Snape, the actually experienced spy whom she would have eagerly recruited had he survived the war (in spite of being a generally detestable man), were dead. The rest were untrustworthy – as she had found out the hard way with Crouch senior.

Bones' niece was a good interrogator for the Aurors, and Gienah had an eye on her – as she did for the entirety of the group that comprised the younger Order of the Phoenix who had acquitted themselves wonderfully well as they rebuilt magical Britain – but she was too high-profile now, especially in Harry's absence. Weasley, who had taken his chess skills into real life to avenge the death of half his family in one stroke, and so could have been passably trained and also had a history of working with Potter that couldn't be written off, was dead.

What she basically needed was a trustworthy, refined, subtler, sharper, more cynical and paranoid, younger version of Mad-Eye Moody – one, if possible, with fewer compunctions (Moody had always brought the bastards alive, as far as he could). In spite of his recent troubles, Potter was it. And due to those very troubles, she was loath to load him just yet.

There was one obstacle in that path – Hermione Granger. The woman had displayed uncommon belligerence and resilience, such virtues as often seen in opposition to the other, as she strove to protect the humanity of Harry. While that was good when protecting him from the Hallows, when it came to the larger picture, her efforts would be dangerous hindrances. Potter was needed, because he had put himself in the line of fire, and had stood up to be counted. He was too valuable to be lost to well-meaning friends now, when he was nearly ready. She would stoke whatever fires it took to forge and reforge him.

And back on the topic of their conversation, she was proven right again, for he picked the one word out of her explanation that held a plethora of connotations.

"What do you mean "the Universe"?"

Gienah leaned back, looking truly worried and tired. "There is a very different version of the Tales of Beedle the Bard, Harry," using his name on the rare occasions that the situation was horribly grave. "And now we know for a fact that at least one myth is not a myth at all."

"What did this myth say?"

"It speaks of a group of individuals who trapped a treacherous being which has been dubbed as Death, and it is not elaborated whether it was a taken name like Voldemort or the real thing, and stopped it – or her – from destroying the entire Universe for her amusement alone by making her break the power she held in the form of a gem. The split would hold her at abeyance in perpetuity. A power that was not meant to be reunited, but you unwittingly have." If she needed to lay a heavy layer of guilt, guilt for something that in all honesty wasn't his fault at all, just so as to ensure that he would listen, accept and acquiesce, then she felt not the least bit bad about it.

"The Hallows," Harry noted pensively.

"Yes. It spoke of the Peverells, yes, but also of Bor Burison and Odin Borson…"

"Odin, like the Norse myths?"

"The very same. It also mentioned a mystic from the East called Agamotto, and many others. But this "Death" was not vanquished without losses, for the Peverells perished over time, yet it was a welcome death, for they lived in fear of the power that had been taken from the entity much as you do. Odin's young daughter was cursed to be her vessel. Agamotto was forever lost to time, existing, and yet not, everywhen at once."

"Everywhen?"

"He managed to cheat "Death" by the expedient of turning back time over and over again, binding her to it."

This tale seemed absurd. And yet, Gienah Black felt the need to speak of it. Then again, he had seen the absurd, the horrible and perversions of nature and magic and any laws the Universe set often enough.

"This is fantastical."

"Is it?"

"Do you believe it?"

"I don't want to."

This was a non-answer. But then it opened up a new avenue for their paranoia. "It is the worst based on what we have already seen. Felix Felicis in the hands of HYDRA, and them creating a real Fountain of Fair Fortune for nefarious reasons is a bad thing in itself too."

"True."

Gienah watched as Harry stood from the chair and walked towards the fake window. It provided a view of London as it could be seen from about twenty feet above the Tower of London.

"What do you think of me being significantly visible before, you know…"

"Are you really Harry Potter? You do realise how much of a show there will be after that?"

"That is what we are aiming for, aren't we? To make things believable? Nobody's going to mourn an absent man."

"I thought you hated that?"

"You know, had this been ten years ago, I would have told you how much I hate the attention in detail. Today I will say, yes, I hate it. But, for the ah…Greater Good, this is going to be necessary. My reservations, fears, beliefs and whatever else do not matter, not when there's such clear and present danger. But then that's not new, is it? I doubt that the boy I was till an hour before that dream Riddle sent me would recognise what I have since become."

"I am quite sure that when things came to it, you were always capable of it. You held on to Quirrell, if I remember right. It may have been self-defence, but you were cognisant of the fact that you were hurting him. And you did truly want to kill your parents' betrayer, just as you wanted to kill the woman who nearly murdered Sirius. You used the Cruciatus on her; not effective on the woman when she had had experience with Riddle, but your instincts always ran that way." Gienah smiled in the most infuriatingly, smugly, benign manner ever. Harry didn't like being reminded of that. It had been his one failing. He had killed over and over in the war and often since, when there was no recourse left, for self-defence would not hold water in times of peace, and rightly so. He had never used the Killing Curse, and the Cruciatus had been a momentary lapse in rage, but if she had to resort to these methods, she would.

"You haven't given me your opinion regarding what I asked you."

"Do it as you see fit. We shall go over the plan. We will need to account for any infiltrators ourselves."

"While you were busy trying to guilt me into doing whatever it is that you want me to do," Harry drily retorted, "I was forming the rudimentary outline of one. If, that is, you would pause in your rather unsubtle means of manipulation and care to listen."

Gienah just smiled widely and unashamedly.

"I suppose Dumbledore's portrait will teach me, so that's magic handled. If you would care to supervise, because I bloody well won't touch that thing alone, then I could use the Stone to command Riddle to teach me flight."

"And since it is painful for the souls brought back…"

"I will very happily cause him the pain. I daresay it would be cathartic."

"Words of Wisdom, indeed."

"About the Animagus forms, I intended to borrow Banner and take him to Hogwarts."

"You believe that the Hulk is an Animagus form?"

"It's a theory."

"He's a muggle. No magic equals no Animagus form."

"He is not naturally radioactive either. That much radiation should have killed him. It may not be an Animagus form, but it could be controlled the same way an Animagus learns control."

"And, may I remind you that you were the one who equated his condition with Lycanthropy?"

"I did. But if we show him an alternative, who knows, maybe he could find a solution."

"That's a very big maybe. What's to stop him from going on a rampage?"

"Grawp, Sirius and Hagrid."

"And you."

"And me," Harry agreed.

"That leaves the aspect of technology."

"I have no obvious solution to that."

"Leave that to me. Consider yourself on indefinite recuperative leave."

"Sure. I will do that. I will also leave you with a few questions. How are we going to hide magic if I am to use such obvious…powers? And how are we going to dissociate Harry Potter from the new persona?"

Corvus pinned Harry with a pitying look.

"The world doesn't need to know what genetic modifications we made to the DNA of our Super-Soldier volunteer, an experiment, since we do not wish to disclose what modifications lead to powers, and which ones. Frankly, everyone seems to buy any bullshit when we sell it suitably packaged, mostly because they have no idea what is possible and what isn't. Land often while flying and make the flying seem like really long jumps; disillusion your wand and make it an illusion of spells from your fingers. Perhaps do the impossible and go for wandless magic," she added derisively and condescendingly, referring to the mythical powers all magicals seemed to yearn for. "Just use your brains. Be a good infiltrator. Learn from Snape's experience as a spy. We can't be overt."

"And what to do when they know."

"Potter, we don't need the people I want you going after. Somewhat abhorrent, but we do need a better system for taking care of problems than the one we had to employ last time."

Harry grimaced. "I hate killing. I am good at it and I have done that too often for my comfort. Not even knowing that the people I killed were unworthy to live stopped me from being disgusted by that."

Jubilation was the closest description of what Corvus felt at that moment. "Well, till you become the boss, I get to assign you missions."

"Manipulative bitch," grumbled Harry in a very low voice. "You fucking want me as a fucking weapon."

"That's what "directors" are for. We direct weapons." Then with a speculative glance she purred, "Fucking, yes."

Harry nearly went as green as the Hulk and beat a hasty retreat.

* * *

"You seem even more paranoid, of late," the councilman remarked.

"And you seem extra observant about me," Colonel Fury replied without missing a beat. "Even without being here."

It had been a trying couple of months for the organisation. They had lost nineteen agents in three months since SNAFU had been dismantled. Since the Brits had pulled Potter out, and all the information regarding him. And since he had been told, as nothing more than a way to set the cat among the canaries, that the organisation he was leading, loyal to and responsible for, had been infiltrated by some of the very worst foes in the business, right under his nose. It had set him on a heightened state of suspicion, and it clashed with the need to portray that all things were normal. As it was, he couldn't bring himself to fully trust the man he spoke to either. Certainly not enough to admit that all nineteen were HYDRA agents he had ordered culled in the most covert manner. And that was in addition to the favours he found the Brits had done them.

"To those who take the time to see, old friend, it is blatantly obvious."

"Then you should know why."

"How many is it now?"

"Nineteen in the past month alone."

"You saw it too."

"I always do. You put me in charge for a reason. When my agents suddenly start coming down with fatal accidents, it is a cause to worry."

"I agree. I advise you to not entrust anyone with new missions for a while."

"And have them cooped up and start killing each other?"

"There is that," the councilman agreed. "What do you intend to do?"

Nick Fury took his time answering. He couldn't trust the council. He couldn't trust anyone.

"I intend to rotate partners for a while. Can't let there be a pattern for whoever is hunting them to use. We are flying blind here, there's little else to do right now."

"I agree. Keep me posted."

In response Fury switched the transceiver off.

The councilman switched on another secure link.

"Fury might start looking closely. I don't think he knows, but we need to keep it that way."

"Ja, Herr Secretary. This has been a recurring setback. We have to scale back for a while. Otherwise Project Insight will not take off."

"I am assigning all personnel to desk jobs in phases. Give me a list of disposable ones. Perhaps a traitor could be culled in it."

The man on the other end merely grunted. "Hail HYDRA!"

"Hail HYDRA!"

* * *

"Hello Dr. Banner," a very gossamer light voice said, startling Bruce, who was deeply engrossed in reading about the society he had somehow become a part of. Well, it was less of understanding, and more of being horrified about his…benefactor, for lack of a better term, being pushed into the war as a child, and having a kill count in triple digits.

"Miss Lovegood," he weakly acknowledged, once he had wrestled control back from the Hulk. This singularly odd woman was the one regular visitor he couldn't even pretend to understand. Yet, it was obvious that she was very dear to Potter, for he not only accepted all her idiosyncratic utterances, he even indulged them regularly. "Please don't startle me."

"You really should let Mr. Green out to play every once in a while," Luna replied with a frown, not paying much attention to the admonishment.

"I don't think that is wise."

"Have you ever tried boxing?"

Bruce paused, grit his teeth, and then made an effort to calm himself at the latest non-sequitur. Then again, with Luna Lovegood, you could never say that something was unrelated, not that Bruce knew.

"I haven't really had the chance."

"Hmm…maybe you should."

"Why?" He wondered why he was humouring her. He could just be polite and not engage the woman and maybe she would be distracted by something else.

"The Wrackspurts around your head," Luna answered with an air that suggested that the reason should have been obvious to anyone with even half a brain.

"What?"

"Wrackspurts, Dr. Banner. I do remember telling you about them?"

Bruce tried not to whimper in irritated confusion. "What of them?"

"Oh dear, it seems the infestation is worse than I thought."

Bruce just looked blankly.

"Bruce, the Wrackspurts are confusing and irritating you so much that you cannot talk to yourself." Almost at the end of his tether, Bruce almost snapped disparagingly about people who talked to themselves, when she continued, "It's making you think that your rage is not you, even though you think of it all the time and get angrier each time you think of how angry you are."

It took Bruce a couple of minutes to make sense of what she said. She wanted him to pursue boxing to let go of a bit of steam instead of constantly being afraid of getting too angry and making the anger and the fear a self-perpetuating cycle. She was also asserting that the Hulk was a part of him, instead of being the Other Guy and was disagreeing with his habit of dissociation, and wanted him to communicate with the Hulk and make peace with him. On one hand, he thought it was rather brilliant. On the other, he was beyond irritated by the fact that she wouldn't say it straight out. She was a singularly infuriating lady, Luna Lovegood, who said a lot and said nothing at the same time, all seemingly without really meaning to.

In the interim, Luna busied herself with the books.

"You are reading about the War," she observed.

"Yes. I didn't realise Potter was that important. He understated it a lot."

"He always was. He is my friend. Friends are always important."

"In your War, I mean," Bruce corrected with deliberate calmness.

"Maybe," Luna agreed. "I think my friend Harry is more important, though."

That again left Bruce baffled. "That's what I said. I didn't realise that your friend, Harry Potter, was as important as I find he was in a war that the world didn't know of."

"You know of the war. You just believed in the odd happenings such as falling bridges, tornadoes and everything else in England in that time to be what they were proclaimed as. You say you are a man of science. That aberrant data must have caught even your attention."

This sudden switch to a serious tone and sensible speech jarred Banner again. He just couldn't make head or tail of this woman.

"The giants, did it, according to the book," Bruce carefully replied.

"Perhaps," Luna replied. "Venomous Bubblebreaths are sometimes eaten by Olive Bucks when they set out to make new territories. It makes their dung poisonous, and destroys much of the patches of forests on the boundaries of their territories. Does that mean the Bubblebreaths are destructive, or the Bucks?"

Bruce assumed they were magical creatures, but that was beside the point. "You believe that the Giants by themselves were not responsible for the destruction, but rather it was the humans, those Death Eaters, who were."

"That is right, too," Luna happily agreed.

She said nothing more, leaving Bruce to ruminate upon the odd conversation. It was the longest one he had directly had with her, yet.

Then it struck him. Once it did, it was a bit embarrassing really. Luna Lovegood seemed to speak in analogies for the most part. And once that realisation struck, things not only became somewhat clearer, but he started to marvel at her meaning too. She seemed to think that Ross had to shoulder much of the blame, for instigating the whole Hulk process in the first place. It was somewhat reassuring. She was not crazy. She was just…unconventional.

"But the Giants still destroyed…"

"Venomous Bubblebreaths don't stop being venomous, Dr. Banner. They do sting very painfully and cause nausea and hallucinations. But Bubblebreaths do stay far from other creatures, and are very solitary. It doesn't change their nature."

"But the giants must have some culpability."

"Yes, they do. That's why they we had to kill them when they attacked. Sirius killed one with his bare hands, did you know?"

Bruce nodded. The idea of the slightly childish man who was his host killing about ten tonnes of pure strength, roughly four times as tall as himself (and Sirius was a tall man) by going straight for its joints and then its head, sat ill with him, just as it was somewhat reassuring that he could probably hold the Hulk at least for a few seconds. It was what had driven home to him the idea that these people really didn't care for the Serum. The short biography of the man had described how he had ended up being half-dead, quite literally, before being saved by what was reported to be some alchemical experimental concoction that Dumbledore given him. That must have been the magical version of the serum, and it certainly worked.

Bruce had found himself respecting Dumbledore a lot. If the man had actually done even half of what it was claimed he had done, then he was certainly a man of great intellect.

"But," Luna continued gently, "I know a giant, who really is just a big, really, really big child, who just doesn't know his own strength and is really unhappy if he hurts anyone. Most giants aren't like him, but that doesn't mean some couldn't be too."

This time, she was hinting at the Hulk quite directly. And it got too close for comfort, so Bruce did what he did best. He avoided the topic.

"Why is Harry more important?" he asked, truly out of the blue.

"Did you read about his sacrifice?"

"Yes. I am just chalking it down to magic, but I don't understand how it might have worked."

"You don't understand, because it shouldn't have. Harry knew he was walking out to die. And he had accepted it."

And Bruce could see how that might have earned Potter loyalty.

"But you misunderstand," Luna corrected, again, very seriously. "After his sacrifice before it, dying was not that big."

Bruce's eyes almost bulged out at that proclamation.

"What do you mean?"

"Harry was my friend when nobody else was. He taught me, cared for me, when nobody else would. And through him, I made many more friends who treated me just the same as him. People only know Harry as a great man, Dr. Banner. I have known him when he was a good one."

"I do not understand."

"Have you read the papers of that time?"

"Ms. Granger gave me access to her archives."

"And you know when he started killing?"

"Yes."

"That was the sacrifice." At Bruce's uncomprehending look, she explained. "It was not revenge, not really. It was desperation. Harry was my friend before most others. But just as I had him, he only ever had us. So, he decided to do whatever it would take to keep us safe. Sometimes, he even sacrificed his humanity for it. What more is left after that? Harry became a weapon so we wouldn't have to be."

It set Bruce thinking again. Perhaps, he thought, his perception of the man was smeared as that of anyone from the military after Ross. Seen from Luna Lovegood's eyes, everything was very different.

"Do you trust him?"

"The question is, why don't you?" she asked in a faintly disappointed tone.

Bruce had no answer. It didn't feel nice at all.

* * *

As such, Bruce resolved to observe Harry more closely than he had thereunto. Then again, that night was going to be an aberration. He had seen the man usually in his stoic, extremely polite, reserved way as he was around him, always dealing with some issue that seemed to crop up, or as the fun guy he was around Teddy Lupin. That night at dinner, though, Harry was in a grim and grumpy mood.

"Uncle Harry, you are really, really, really sad today!"

"I am not, Teddy."

"No," Teddy insisted.

Even Teddy had picked up on the difference enough to comment on it.

"What's going on?" Sirius asked.

Whatever it was, it was really big. And Harry had no intention to speak.

"Harry," Hermione demanded.

"I went to meet Corvus today. She was going to assess whether I could return to full-time work."

"Oh." Hermione's tone contained a whole world of relief and joy that she was unable to disguise. Obviously, since Harry wasn't happy about it, it meant he wasn't cleared. "And?"

"Harry Potter is no longer to work at the Department except for the enchanting Mastery. Even that is official now."

"Oh Harry!" Hermione cried, going around to hug and console him, even if it was painfully evident that she was very happy about the development. It was uncomfortably long enough for Sirius to make a crass comment about consoling him further and for Harry to use the muffling spell to prevent Teddy from listening to Harry very rudely informing his godfather where he could get off.

"You're happy about it, Hermione," Harry grumpily mumbled as she released him, calling her out.

She in turn honestly tried to protest, but ended up blustering in a manner very reminiscent of Cornelius Fudge, before giving up. "Yes I am."

"Well at least someone is," he retorted, behaving more like a teen.

"I had hoped she would do this before you travelled," Hermione blithely admitted.

"You know, friends usually are less joyful when people lose their jobs. What makes you happy about me being useless to everyone?"

"You have never been useless Harry. Frankly, I admit I am relieved to see you free of that job as well," Remus admonished. "It was destroying you."

"Traitors the both of you," Harry muttered.

"You can have your angst and pity party later. Tell us what happened."

"She said that she still is not inclined to send me out into the field. I will be continuing my Mastery with her. Dr. Banner remains my responsibility, and I will be the lab rat for you when you build isolations for magic and electrical and electronic interfaces. In other words, she thinks I am an invalid and that I should be cooped up in an office and spend my time with books like Dumbledore did and that I should be Banner's nanny even though he doesn't need one."

Everyone winced at that.

"That's harsh, Harry."

"Doesn't mean it's untrue," Harry replied mulishly. "Even my Mastery is once a week."

"It's harsh on Bruce." When Sirius chastised someone for insensitivity, it made everyone pause.

"Of course it is! That's what I told her. Sorry to speak about this like you aren't here, Dr. Banner, but come on! She's agreed to task you with the setting up of our labs and everything and she's treating you like a bomb that might go off any time. I said as much to her. She wants me to work on the Hulk with you."

If Bruce Banner thought that Harry was behaving too out-of-character, he kept the thought aside for the time-being. He hadn't expected being supported.

"Most people are rightly scared."

"Look, you have led research teams for years. Whatever irritations and frustrating things that may happen again, you either know how to manage them, or they are too usual and unavoidable for you to turn into the Hulk over them. You are the expert. You should be trusted, that's all. She didn't take kindly to that as you can see."

The implication was not lost on Bruce. The guy he couldn't bring himself to trust much, had basically hedged his entire career on Bruce's control and had been fired for it. And he was defending him even then. Potter seemed to trust whatever he had seen in his, Bruce's, mind.

"It's an obvious risk."

"Risk management is a thing, you know. It doesn't mean fearing the risk, but working around it. Why are you giving me her arguments again? Did she speak to you or something?"

"I am just saying that I can see where she's coming from. At least she's honest about it. Ross just started hunting me."

"Well, if she is going to have me play nanny to you, then it's going to be by my rules, and not her," Harry stoutly declared.

"What do you intend to do?"

He waited patiently for the response, but instead, Harry looked a bit lost. "I didn't exactly have a plan then," he sheepishly admitted. "I was just angry about being fired, so I haven't exactly thought about it. I might need a day or two."

Bruce smiled in spite of himself, while Hermione snorted.

Sirius, however, looked at Harry suspiciously, who jutted his chin at the adjoining room in a fluid gesture which nobody else caught.

"That's fine," Hermione informed him. "We are working on our protections for electrical and electronic systems, and you are the user who can induce the worst-case faults, so it fits in our plans. Come along tomorrow or the day-after."

"Not like I have a choice," Harry grumbled. "Oh yeah, Dr. Banner, when you have time, we are going to Hogwarts between June and September. You can turn into the Hulk there, and I can introduce you to Hagrid and Grawp and Professor McGonagall."

Bruce who had just warmed up ever so slightly to Harry was struck cold at that. "Why would I willingly turn into the Hulk?"

"I had a theory that Corvus didn't like much. I think you can control the Hulk. Professor McGonagall was our transfiguration teacher – that's turning one thing into another – and she is an Animagus too. She turns into a cat. She can help you learn control. The Hulk is not crazy. I didn't realise it at first, but it can speak words, right? And you have enough control to not attack people not fighting you."

"You think the Hulk is a humanoid Animagus form?" Remus asked.

"Dr. Banner could be powerful enough to wield magic, for all we know. Perhaps a late-bloomer, or perhaps just a whisker less powerful than required to be classified as a muggle-born, since neither of his parents were magical. Maybe the radiation jump started the process, and since he didn't know, and had nobody to guide him, things got out of hand." He spoke directly to Bruce, as he explained, "Your transformations are triggered in a similar way as the accidental magic in children."

"And this Professor McGonagall can guide me?" trying not to even think about the implications of that. Him, a magic-using, wand-waving wizard?

"Yes. She is a global authority on the topic."

"And Hagrid and Grawp?"

"Hagrid is a half-giant. He is nearly ten feet tall and I am pretty sure weighs as much as an elephant. He is possibly the gentlest person you'd ever hope to meet. He might even want to raise the Hulk like a child, come to think of it. And Grawp is his kid half-brother. He is small by giant standards. Only sixteen feet. They can help if things get out of hand."

Bruce was only vaguely aware of Teddy giggling as his steak dropped off his fork.

* * *

"What really happened?" Sirius demanded as soon as he had shepherded Harry and Remus (on Harry's request) into the room after Hermione had left and Bruce had retired for the night.

Harry held a finger to his lips and added a couple more silencing charms to the ones Sirius had put up.

"Did you see the dossier she sent with you?"

"HYDRA?"

"Grindelwald was one of their Heads."

"Fuck."

"That's what I said."

"You think they might have infiltrated us."

"Yes."

"Sorry, what is this about?" Remus interjected.

"This is about the little fact that Harry lied at the table. Nice acting there, neither Moony nor Hermione caught it."

"I didn't lie. Harry Potter is never going to work for the department again."

"What exactly…?" Remus started again, unable to get a toehold on the conversation.

"HYDRA are an international terrorist-cum-world-domination zealot agency. They allied with Grindelwald. They have never been successfully defeated fully, and we have reason to believe that they may have infiltrated most European governments on both sides."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Come on Remus. You can't be that naïve."

"What? They are sending Harry undercover…?" Remus trailed off as the looks on both Sirius and Harry's faces told him the truth. "You lied! You haven't been fired have you?"

"Harry Potter has been, Moony. I haven't."

"What ruse?"

"We need to pull a Peter." Harry's face was twisted in disgust at that, and Sirius mirrored it. Remus caught on a few moments later.

"Why?"

"The Hallows again, Moony. We don't know what they do beyond what they did to me. We can't risk them falling into the wrong hands."

"And by staging your death, you intend to make the world believe that it really was only a children's story."

"Obviously."

"Should you be telling me this?"

"I shouldn't. But even if I was under an Unbreakable Vow to not reveal this, I would have found a way to let you know. You entrusted me with that duty. Moony, HYDRA have several modus operandi. One of their most heinous is human experimentation."

"You fear they will go after Teddy."

Sirius crossed over to a cupboard and filled a glass with a couple of fingers of firewhiskey for Remus. Harry avoided it, and Sirius didn't feel like having one just then.

"How long till…?"

"Two years, give or take a couple of months, likely after Teddy goes to Hogwarts. I have been tasked with acquiring certain skills along with a specialised training programme she's putting together, and being a visible public figure till then. Moony, I would have never asked this of you, but…"

"I will keep my ears to the ground. You don't need to ask, Harry."

"What do you need me to do?" Sirius asked.

"I need both of you to help me create a persona. One that needs to be inducted into the department at least a few months before my "death". All the stuff, you know, alibis, identification, cover stories, safe houses, character, mannerisms, the works. We need to weave in the skills Corvus wants me to have into that. And we need to consider the impact of the means of my death. I personally am veering towards a muggle car accident while on a night out with friends."

"Right. If you are murdered then that would mean the Hallows pass on. A muggle accident makes the things useless even if they pass on."

"Exactly. Even though a muggle could use the stone and the cloak, the Third Hallow is forever out of use."

"Do you two realise how morbid you are being?" Remus incredulously demanded. "And Padfoot, you want me to help you do what Peter did. You are alright with that?"

"I would rather have the world think that Harry is dead than have him hunted by HYDRA. Harry's well-trained and more powerful than anyone we know. This keeps control with us. I want him protected. If I have to go back to Azkaban for that, I would do it."

"Cut the dramatics, Padfoot. You'd be more useful as an angry, vengeful, distraught godfather, snapping orders and being the office terror and who'd guide the newbie. I got the impression that Corvus wanted someone other than her in charge, and I am not doing it. She's anyway keeping you busy with field work for her."

"You want me to lead that thing."

"She wants to load me with it, maybe do what SHIELD did and find out what those death things do, no matter what she claims, and I am not going to do it. Split the duties between the two of you if you need to, Padfoot, Moony. You are what remains of the Marauders. Make it count. Keep the office prison away from me and protect Ted. You are the only two trustworthy people who can pull off the hoax both ways. Who else can I turn to?"

"And this way you can keep an eye on my dear old Aunt."

"The phrasing was awkward, what with the way she…"

"Keeps flirting?" Sirius completed with a full-body shudder. "Yeah. It's horrible."

"Yeah, but well, I think I would prefer you there for that reason too. We can't trust her fully, Sirius."

"Might be a good idea to start checking right from her."

"True. She is wily enough to challenge us like that and still play us like pawns, if indeed she might have HYDRA links, or something else entirely. That's why we need better information control. I don't want her knowing all the specifics of the new persona."

"Good idea. How about we make two very similar personalities, use one and show her the other? You know just keep something in reserve?"

Harry nodded in silent agreement.

"What are you going to do with them?" Remus asked.

"No mercy. Pull out information in any possible manner, then kill."

"That's going to be a Herculean task. If you are going on a one-man crusade, that is. These organisations grow faster than they can be brought down."

"Iolus cauterised the necks to stop the re-growing heads," Sirius commented sagely. "Just killing them won't suffice. HYDRA doesn't need to be cut down, it needs to be unravelled. Even if you could pull all the information from every person you interrogate, there will be dead ends, repeated and redundant information, maybe even spies placed inside HYDRA, like Snape was Dumbledore's. You need a really good way to analyse the information, so that you can streamline your approaches over time."

"Very much so. I can't do that alone, and we can't have either of you doing it. I might need a couple of people helping me, or at least trustworthy people with whom I can consult in a crunch. And we need to go above Gienah's head on this one."

"If only we could be sure in her case, there is a lot more we could do," Sirius grumbled. "She is my Aunt. I don't know whether I can never fully trust her in spite of that or because of that."

The three men were silent as they considered the situation.

"We have got two years or so before Harry is deployed," started Remus, mostly thinking out aloud. "And there is reason to believe that your will and mind could be stronger than hers; your magic certainly is. As invasive and distasteful as this is, make her a benchmark of sorts. If you can invade the mind of any person in her department without detection, that will both give you the necessary information and also create a relative level of expertise in wandless legillimency."

"I am not on Dumbledore's level there, Moony."

"What you need to be is way beyond Dumbledore's level, though I suppose that the lack of intent contributed to that. In fact, now I challenge you to calm Moony, without the Wolfsbane, through a protective transparent wall, with only Legillimency. If what you say is true, then there simply is no time. I am invested in this on both Teddy's account and yours. If we have to make you some sort of overpowered, overachieving super-skilled super-wizard, then so be it. You aim for that, at least you could reach a third of the way there."

Sirius and Harry traded amused glances at that. Moony the taskmaster was a bit jarring to see.

"We would still need to hide these developments, though."

"Yes. And for that, you have to actually do what Corvus said, our misgivings regarding her notwithstanding. You should be exceptionally visible."

"I know. I suggested that, actually," Harry replied as he summoned a couple of butterbeers from the cupboard.

The three chugged on their respective drinks pensively, before Sirius, unable to take the silence (every silence was an awkward one for Sirius), declared "Well, then, here's to Project Peter.".

"Really? Peter?"

"If you are going to undertake one of Hercules' twelve labours, then it makes sense to name it after the man who remained hidden for twelve years the way you want to, however much I hate him."

"That's fucking cheesy, corny and contrived and you know it. And I am not living like a rat. Call it Project Iolus at least."

"No. It's Peter. And we don't know your Animagus form, though you might work on that with Banner. You could easily be some slippery creature, hiding and striking from the shadows."

"I would have taken offence to that once."

"Yeah, when you really were a Gryffindor."

"Unlike you, I grew up. You still go charging in with all the strength and grunts and smell of a troll."

"If I hadn't known James and Lily were married…"

"Yes, you'd have called me a bastard. Move on, old man."

"Old man? Let me tell you, I have such vitality that women…"

"I don't want to know," Harry interrupted loudly, cutting off Sirius' extolling of his own…virtues.

"Says the twenty-six-year-old virgin," Sirius snidely remarked.

"What's that got to do with anything? What makes you think the stuff I have been involved in allows me a life at all?"

"That's what I am saying, my **_child_**. I am not looking for deep love shite. That's for children. And James and Lily, but then I never thought either was particularly bright."

"Yes well, I have never been a child, and never knew my parents, so thanks for disparaging them."

"And we have the drama," Remus idly commented.

"Way to lay that angsty guilt-trip on me, _kid_. Been there, done that. It doesn't really work on me."

"Well, thank Merlin for small favours. I thought you were going _soft_ in your dotage, and so had to boast to your godson and best friend about your vitality."

"And you can never stand to attention even when a bird is chasing you like James chased Lily, only more subtly."

"And a cat-fight involving a dog," Remus said again, to nobody in particular, if only a bit louder.

"I have to distance myself from that sort of thing when you resort to cradle-robbing, Sirius. That last one I had to chase off before you could score with your Cyborg routine, she was only a firstie when I was in my third year. Moony has taught her. What are you, a barely legal paedophile?"

"And the playground insults," the werewolf continued even louder, trying hard to be the voice of adult behaviour and politeness.

"Moony had lots of seventh year girls vying for his attention. Why do you think he finally caved into Dora?" Sirius retorted, a bit side-tracked and then groaned.

"Yes! You couldn't find anything to say to me! I win!" Harry exulted.

"You take that back! You didn't win!"

"I so did win!"

"Why did you bring Dora and me into this?" Remus demanded.

"Leave that Moony. You're my friend, aren't you? He didn't win right?"

"Yeah speak up Moony. You've got to say I won. Even dad would agree."

"I am not feeling very charitable towards you, Padfoot, for bringing Dora…"

"Moony says I won!"

"I hate both of you!"

"ENOUGH!" Remus finally yelled, having had enough of the tomfoolery that all three knew was only an act. "Stop it, idiots! If you are done, maybe we should retire for the night!"

"Yes, goodnight retiree," Sirius mocked.

Remus flipped him the bird, setting the two sniggering at his back.

When Moony was gone, Harry admitted, "You were right about Moony cradle-robbing our cousin." At Sirius growing smile, he added, "But I still win!"

* * *

 **SACHETAN**

 **100 light years from Earth (Terra)**

Sachetan, the planet where everything was always silent, where even beauty turned to reality with but a thought, a thought sent through the minds of all the inhabitants of the planet with barely a ripple on each mind, wasn't so silent.

"You do realise that your resistance shall mean very little, little one? It is futile."

In the hand of the speaker was held the throat of a very humanoid being, a very faintly orange-hued child that seemed just about five years old, just old enough to understand one thought from another, just old enough to know a good thought from a bad one. A child of absolutely pure thoughts, of absolutely innocent curiosity, of such simplicity that defined the very word. The child held the terrible knowledge of the thoughts of any being its wise eyes turned to, and yet it remained as always, unwilling to judge. It knew of every sentience on every world, even other worlds that not only bore other sentient creatures, but were sentient themselves. It was one in the long line of bearers. A mantle, that now, it seemed likely, it would never pass on to another.

Yet, it looked placidly at the attacker.

"I do not want to do this, little one. You should realise this. No thought of mine is hidden from you."

The child did not answer.

Behind the speaker, a green-skinned alien flinched as subtly as she could. "Little One", an epithet that was burnt into her mind… She would always remember the way her "Father" had stolen her from her family, and her world, her childhood and her parents from her. Bastard. Insane. Terrifying.

A creature that Gods themselves could fear.

Thanos, the Titan.

The mad creature intent on bringing balance to the Universe with a plan told to him by the One they could not see or perceive.

"Please, not my child, please," the child's mother begged. "Please, take me, leave…"

With just a swat of the gigantic creature's hands, the woman's wish was fulfilled. Permanently. The child acknowledged the death of its mother in a detached way. The grip on its throat tightened. The violence wrought upon its planet intensified.

"No."

The little voice that broke though the grasp tightening on its throat was defiant. It was also its undoing, as it broke the one law that it had to follow as a bearer. That it would not judge any thought or intention beyond what it meant according to the thoughts of any other being. It was the ultimate intelligence, learning by probing, by experiencing the thoughts of others, till its bearer judged an intention without the intelligence itself being involved in the thought on any level. It was a possession of sorts, but a willing one. The child used the last of its tethers with the intelligence to speak words of warning, even as it felt its mind start to revert to that of what could truly be considered a child.

"You are an idiot. And a liar. You will fail. Your ambition is based on a lie, and you are too stupid to understand it and too stubborn to recognise your flaws."

The little orange head glowed yellow.

The Great Titan's face was stricken. Not because of what he had heard but because of what he saw with the glow. He had heard it too many times and from too many souls. No. His cause was terrible but just. His will was strong. The Lady would not drive him the wrong way. But his conscience, it rebelled. He was well-advised by the Lady, and yet, yet, this salvation was painful to him as he delivered it, even though the world would be grateful for it. A terrible, but just solution, as She had assured him it was. A solution to the problem everywhere across the Universe, on countless worlds, a problem that had destroyed his own planet. He had embarked upon a conquest that would ensure the survival of the Universe. His conscience was but a necessary sacrifice.

"I am sorry, little one," Thanos said, true regret flowing through his words.

"I am sorry you do not understand."

Those were the child's last words, as the gigantic purple hands closed upon its little head. Thanos closed his eyes and sighed as his hand crushed the child's head and released the body, only to pick the stone that thought and learnt and reasoned and planned and felt, and yet was painfully innocent, from the remains.

The child's father released a wail that was also a roar, a sound of such pain and anger, and such emotion that even the Titan sympathised.

"I understand your pain," Thanos consoled, as he held the head of the father with the same hand that had crushed and murdered the child.

"Daanav!" swore the man. "Monster! You have no heart. What good can understanding do? Murderer!"

The Titan did not speak. He retreated to his ship, his daughters, Nebula and Gamora and his trusted children trailing in the wake of their Lord, Master, Father. The attack on Sachetan was successful.

"Little one," Thanos addressed his beloved daughter, Gamora, who managed not to flinch with only the utmost effort. It made him pause. "Do you fear me?"

"Should you not be feared, Father?"

Thanos smiled a sad, grim smile. "I trust you, daughter. Repay it by locating the Stone that would temper this wilful one."

"Yes father. As you command." Gamora was trying not to even think of her relief as she would get to be far from the Monster.

"I beg you, father," interrupted Thanos' other daughter, Nebula. "Let me do it."

"I do not doubt you'd try, for you know the consequences of failing to do so, young one," Thanos replied coldly. "But I fear you may be a little past being able to bear the consequences of fail–"

"Die Monster!" interrupted a scream as the Sachetanian father, in utter despair, thrust a spear of thought through him, caring nought for stealth in his pain and rage.

It did not touch the Titan. The Stone relayed and amplified his thoughts and the spear disintegrated.

"I shall spare you the pain," Thanos sorrowfully said. And then his hand clenched around the stone, as he thought the planet out of existence.

* * *

 **To those who notice the discrepancy between the administration of the magical variant of the Super Soldier Serum to Sirius (and isn't that an alliterative mouthful?), please note that Dumbledore was already famous for his work as an alchemist, or at least for working with one. The Department of Mysteries had no intention of ever revealing their full capabilities. Make of that what you will.**

 **Earth-616 had the Mind Gem (not Stone) on Deneb-IV. In the MCU, we don't really know how the Mind Stone came to be with Thanos, nor do we know how he ever stumbled upon the information regarding the Stones. I am taking creative license with that.**

 **Thirdly, most characters that we see in the MCU are severely ret-conned in one way or the other. Harry, obviously is the ret-conned version of another.**


End file.
